Movie Nation

It should never come as a surprise that a former child actor who has managed a solid and long-lived career in the movies knows enough to step behind the camera with confidence.

Ron Howard did it. Why not Jackie Earle Haley?

“Criminal Activities” is a surehanded, tight and minimalist amateur-kidnapping thriller that benefits from a cast of some repute and a few nods to Tarantino within its 94 minutes. It kind of comes to pieces at the end, as too many movies do. But Haley, of “Breaking Away” and “The Watchman” and scores of films in between, acquits himself well in his directing debut.

Michael Pitt, Rob Brown, Christopher Abbott are four pals reunited by the tragic death of a former classmate. They’ve barely toted Matthew’s coffin to the grave before the griping about the current state of their lives begins. One’s just 22 days sober, another has a detective following his cheating fiance.

But Bryce (Brown) has a hot stock tip. And the wussy but well-connected Noah (Dan Stevens of “Downton Abbey”) says he has access to the money.

The deal turns out to be a bust, Noah’s cash turns out to be mob connected. And the sharp-dressed Eddie with a lot of vowels in his last name (John Travolta) wants that cash back. He has a proposal, an offer they cannot refuse. Kidnap this relative of the leader of a rival mob so that he can be exchanged for a relative of Eddie’s who is being held hostage.

Robert Lowell’s script skips over some of the standard issue “prepare for the heist” stuff. The  guys just show up where the menacing Marques (Edi Gathegi) is eating with pals, grab him in the toilet and stuff him into the trunk of a car.

That van that chases them? Those were the Feds, listening in on Marques. Turns out Eddie Lovato’s goons (Haley plays his ice-blooded right-hand man) and Marques’ gang aren’t the only people who want to know where he is, and what these four non-mob guys will do to him.

Aside from stupidly show him their faces. And accidentally give him their names. And listen to his endless tirade of threats, bribes and philosophy-of-life rambles.

Travolta essentially plays another version of Chili Palmer from “Get Shorty.” Overdressed, same time-defying hairline, more capable of violence than willing to demonstrate it, a jogger sucking down wheatgrass (or worse) milkshakes.

Of all the talkers in “Criminal Activities,” he’s the talkiest. He starts by explaining “the seven rules of economics” — “scarcity, inequality,” etc. He quotes “Macbeth.” He looks smart and sharp and scary.

Ever since “Reservoir Dogs,” thrillers of this ilk have been chatty affairs, with the various characters pausing to deliver monologues and pithy punch lines.

“We have Snoop Dogg’s cousin tied up in here!”

Noah can’t do the really dangerous stuff, because, you know, he’s a fraidy cat.

“I’ll be a liability!”

“Did I ever tell you guys how I got this scar on my ear?”

That last line, delivered by Haley’s character, connects “Criminal” to its Tarantino roots, delivering a flashback that plays like an outtake from “True Romance.”

But as flattering as those echoes of earlier, tougher and tighter scripts are, as good as Haley and Pitt and Stevens and Gathegi and yes, Travolta are, “Criminal Activities” cannot help but unravel. Lowell cannot let the story follow a totally conventional path, and that leads to a third act with semi-surprises and way too much explaining away of those jolts.

That makes the crooked path “Criminal Activities” take so twisted that it trips itself up, no matter how good the players or how competent the director.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, drug use, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Michael Pitt, John Travolta, Edi Gathegi, Dan Stevens, Jackie Earle Haley, Rob Brown
Credits: Directed by Jackie Earle Haley, script by Robert Lowell. An RLJ release.

Running time: 1:34

When all the numbers had been tallied from last weekend, “Spectre” finished with just around $70 million dollars — a big opening, but over 20% below “Skyfall.”

Will it fall off even more this weekend? Almost. About 51% based on Friday’s numbers, per Deadline.com.

It could reach $35 million. “The Peanuts Movie” was neck and neck with it during the week, and stands to do better Saturday than Friday night, but Deadline.com is projecting $24-25 million. That’s a healthy 44% drop, but more than I would guess. Saturday’s numbers are always more telling on kid films.

Not many folks are dying to see an Xmas movie. Now, anyway. “Love the Coopers” is riding scathing reviews into an $8 million opening.

Which is still better than the high-minded bio-pic, “The 33.” Banderas and Lou Diamond Phillips as Chilean miners will manage $5 million, if Friday’s numbers are an indicator.

“My All American,” a faith-based football drama — ANOTHER faith based football drama — cracked the top ten.

In limited release, “Spotlight” about the reporters who broke the Catholic Church’s pedophile-priests scandal, is creaming Angelina/Brad’s “By the Sea.”

And Simon Pegg. That’s Lake “In a World…” Bell, and Simon “Hot Fuzz” Pegg.

They’re the stars of “Man Up,” a genial, edgy rom-com with enough second half twists and turns to make it worth your while. Limited release. Very limited. But if the alternative is, say, “Love the Coopers,” well, there you go.  Anyway, I love that Lake Bell. Truly.

Because “Love the Coopers” wears that label “family holiday comedy” with a weary shame. Seriously, how do you talk three Oscar winners (Keaton, Arkin, Tomei), plus Goodman, Helm, Wilde and Seyfried, into making a mess this treacly?

Maybe by promising each “Hey, it’s a decent check, and you won’t have to work much, as this ensemble is absurdly oversized.”

Terrible reviews. Families may go, because their options appear to be limited this Thanksgiving — a dinosaur cartoon, a “Rocky” sequel, and this.

Poor reviews dog the potentially more inspiration “The 33.” I liked it well enough, but I like Banderas, can tolerate hammy work by Lou Diamond Phillips, and love that happy ending — Thanks, ‘Murica! Viva Chile, mierda!

Everything else, in various stages of limited release, was panned — “My All American,” etc.

Nothing is going to dislodge “Spectre” from the top box office spot this weekend, although “Peanuts” has been neck-and-neck with it every weekday. Perhaps an upset?  I do expect this dog of a Bond picture to swoon and faint on its second weekend.

We all know what happens when we overload our plate at big family holiday meals.

Our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, the tasty starches take precedence and we rationalize all those samples of extra sugary desserts we squeeze in around the edges.

And before we’re a third of the way into digging in, it all swirls into a treacly glop, not quite inedible, not remotely healthy.

The same holds true for big “family” holiday comedies. Overdo it and the glop takes over.

“Love the Coopers” is “This Christmas” and “The Family Stone” and their many inferior clones, all rolled up into one tasteless lump.

“Coopers” packs three Oscar winners, and a lot of talent that might make an acceptance speech someday, into a misshapen mess so cliched and cloying and sweet it’ll make your teeth ache.

There’s the narrator (Steve Martin), opening with, “Ah, the holidays.”

Seriously?

And then there’s long-married couple (Diane Keaton, John Goodman) throwing the big dinner, “one last chance to feel like a family before we tell them” they’re splitting up.

Ed Helm is the lonely, unemployed and divorced father of three who can’t land a job and can’t keep his own secret — that he can’t find work — much longer.

Marisa Tomei is Keaton’s character’s younger sister, who so resents her that she shoplifts a tacky Christmas present. Anthony Mackie is the “robotic” and over-groomed cop who arrests her and takes the entire movie to get from the mall to the jail. In Pittsburgh.

We see the troubled oldest granddaughter (Olivia Wilde) meeting Mr. Nice-But-Not-Compatible in an airport bar, and conning him into playing her “date” with the parents. She’s a failing atheist playwright having an affair with a married man, he’s a Creationist-conservative soldier (Jake Lacy) headed home before deploying overseas.

Her biggest fear? “Anticippointment,” the waiting for Mom and Dad’s first look of disapproval. His duty? Lie about being her beau. “It’s the Christian thing to do!”

Alan Arkin’s the patriarch with a crush on a waitress (Amanda Seyfried) less than half his age, and June Squibb is the slightly-demented old aunt they fetch, once a year, for this big dinner.

“Be sure to take the Internet. It’s faster!”

There’s a lovelorn teen in search of his first kiss, a family sing-along (Helm on guitar, Goodman on harmonica, Keaton and…a first, Arkin, singing), legions of mall Santas, insistent, incessant snow, a snow-tubing outing and endless cutaways to the cute, ill-mannered dog.

Yeah, there are moments that play and big laughs that land, here and there. Wilde comes off the best. Somebody should write her a “Too Beautiful and Too Mean to Date” farce. Soon.

But it’s all so hackneyed, so overfamiliar and formulaic.

The formula should work, but when you can guess a character’s story by the way he looks and the fact he’s named “Percy,” you know you’re dealing with a director (He wrote “Because I Said So,” a low-point in Keaton’s career) and screenwriter  (“Kate & Leopold”) who haven’t observed real people for their “observational” monologues in this century.

There’s always room for a movie like this during the holidays, one that’s safe to take granny and the grandkids to. But “Love the Coopers” will make one and all wonder why they bothered to get up from the table and paid multiplex prices for a movie they’ve seen, many times, before.

MPAA Rating:PG – 13 for thematic elements, language and some sexuality

Cast: Diane Keaton, John Goodman, Olivia Wilde, Marisa Tomei, Alan Arkin, Amanda Seyfried, Ed Helm, Jake Lacy
Credits: Directed by Jessie Nelson, script by Steven Rogers. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:50

The miraculous rescue of 33 men trapped in a Chilean gold mine 2300 feet underground was one of the feel-good stories of 2010. It makes for a touching and amusing if overlong movie from the director of “Under the Same Moon.”

“The 33” has an old-fashioned feel.  From the Spanish-accented English that dominates the dialogue of the international cast, to the grace notes — a wife sings a lovely Spanish lament, the men hallucinate a last supper with their loved-ones — from the cliched way the government officials and engineers bicker about doing “the impossible,” to the conflicts among the diverse men stuck in the mine’s nearly half-mile deep safe room, this fairly reeks of being “the Hollywood version” of that story.

But darned if the jamon and cheese, laid on thick here, doesn’t work.

There’s the old miner whose retirement party opens the movie, the young father-t0-be (Mario Casas), the alcoholic (Juan Pablo Raba) long-estranged from his older sister (Juliette Binoche), a street vendor whose determination shames the government into action.

Antonio Banderas plays the growling veteran miner who shows flint and organizational moxie when the worst happens. And Lou Diamond Phillips, laying it on thick, is the guilt-ridden colleague, trapped with the others, whose job it is “to keep these men SAFE.” Which he does. Repeatedly. Loudly. Passionately.

The mine, a vast, hundred-year-old chasm so worked and carved up that they drove trucks to deliver the men to the deepest corners of it, will give you the willies. No, there’s little mine safety, no OSHA looking out for these guys. You can smell the corporate shortcuts being taken. And we’ve seen Don Lucho (Phillips) lose his latest passionate safety argument with the corporate hack in charge.

The collapse, when it comes, is nerve-rattling. But quick thinking (by Don Lucho) sent them down, to their sanctuary room, and not fleeing up where they most certainly would have perished.

The only thing about the response that has any urgency to it is the way the company gets police out there to shut down the mine and block access to the site. These guys are trapped. Chile, by tradition it is suggested, doesn’t mount rescues. Managing the tragedy is what they’re all about.

Laurence, the Minister of Mines (Rodrigo Santoro) convinces El Presidente (Bob Gunton) that this will look bad, that it’s their “moral duty” to make an effort. Laurence is sent to Copiapo, in the high Atacama Desert where this mine is located. He’s a little too willing to accept the “nothing can be done” assessment of the mine owners. But a slap from Maria (Binoche) sends him into action.

A Chilean drilling engineer (Gabriel Byrne) has neat 3D mapping software and a quick way of explaining the difficulties to Laurence, and the audience. Several international drilling teams are called in when signs of life below are discovered (James Brolin heads the American effort).

And down below, the miners pray and gripe and go through alcohol withdrawal and lament their limited food, looted first aid kit and shrinking chances of survival.

Yes, it’s patronizing, from the odd bit of absurd casting (Gunton as President Pinera, for starters) to the hokey, Spanish-accented dialogue. Banderas, however, overcomes the material and makes us feel the shock, fear, anger and regret that must have dominated these men’s thoughts for their months — yes months — underground.

The most authentic moments come from the real Spanish speakers — an Andean woman blessing the drillers, veteran Chilean TV presenter Don Francisco (real name, Mario Kreutzberger) who shows up to lend gravitas and a nation’s hope to the proceedings.

Director Patricia Riggen may dawdle through the many transitions this story took, veer from cute to cutesy as her actors jump from ham to hammy in some scenes. And her ending lacks the gut-punch of delight that the real rescue, covered nonstop on global cable news networks. But she’s delivered a “33” that still still touches and tickles, a film with a  coda that will leave a lump in the throat.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for a disaster sequence and some language

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche, Rodrigo Santoro, Lou Diamond Phillips, Bob Gunton, Kate del Castillo, James Brolin
Credits: Directed by Patricia Riggen, script by Mikko Alanne, Craig Broten, Michael Thomas. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:07

A “Flutter,” the opening credits of the film of that title tell us, is Brit-slang for “a small wager.”

That sets us up for a movie in the sordid world of betting on sports — Cockney gambling addicts who rarely take the time to shave and clean up before dashing off to the track — a sort of Guy Ritchie-lite thriller.

And that’s what we get, with a Mephistophelian twist. This punter (Joe Anderson) gets himself mixed up with a bookie (Anna Anissmova) who pushes him into deeper and darker bets, seemingly bent on his destruction.

John (Anderson) has made gambling a career. Not that he’s great at it. His idea of “work” is hitting the dog track with his mates (Luke Evans, Max Brown). And somehow, he’s managed to marry a solicitor (Laura Fraser) who is OK with that. The one spoiler I’ll allow here is that this becomes reasonable when we see that the lawyer-wife is the daughter of a gambler.

Like any gambler, John’s eager to act on any tip that comes his way, even from his American dentist (Billy Zane, creepy as you’d expect). When he acts on this, he goes to his on-track bookie, Stan. But “fat, bald” Stan is gone. The new Stan is the overripe Ms. Anissmova, of “The Whistleblower.” Yes, the new Stan is trouble.

John, Wagner (Brown) and Adrian (Evans) aren’t above making the odd bet on each other. Who can eat a “ghost” chili without spitting it out?  But Stan, being an American, is looking for more IN-teresting wagers.

John’s bum tooth? She’s puts big money on whether he’ll have the guts to pull it out himself. There’s a school hostage situation on TV, and she’s got bets in on how many kids the villain will murder.

“That’s sick, Stan.”

“It’s a sick world, John.”

Thus does John, who narrates, spiral down a hole of Stan’s creation. The only bets that feel like “sure things” are whether he can spend a week, in his bathroom, without telling his wife why, and worse.

I like the world director Giles Borg and writer Stephen Leslie conjure up for this  2011 film, finally getting U.S. distribution/VOD play. The differences between American horse and dog tracks and British ones are interesting.

The cast, especially Evans (“Furious 7,” “Dracula Untold”), is why this didn’t stay on the shelf. Anderson (“The Grey,” “The Crazies,” Across the Universe”) makes a properly ratty gambling addict.  But the script and his performance of it never approach desperation. The voice-over narration undercuts the doom that’s supposed to hang over the picture.

The darkly comic premise lacks the lighter touch it needs to be the least bit comic. Stan insists all her bets be “secret,” and has an enforcer (Anton Lesser) to keep things honest. So even as the three pals notice that this one has a shaved head and that one other signs of “extreme wagering,” they don’t talk.

But nobody does enough to take this into the realm of “Faust.” There’s no urgency, and even when a lot’s at stake, you don’t always feel that.

Still, a thriller with this setting and this cast can never go too far wrong. “Flutter” doesn’t hit the jackpot, but at least it’s a decent even-money bet.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, some of it graphic — profanity, gambling

Cast: Joe Anderson, Anna Anissmova, Luke Evans, Laura Fraser, Max Brown and Bill Zane
Credits: Directed by Giles Borg, script by Stephen Leslie. An XLRator release.

Running time: 1:26