Movie Nation

“The Debt” is the first movie in which Hollywood “It” actor Sam Worthington gets around to showing us what all the fuss was about, pre-”Terminator,” pre-”Avatar” and pre-”Clash of the Titans.” As a guilt-ridden Holocaust survivor now a Mossad agent determined to bring a war criminal to Israeli justice, Worthington suggests vulnerability, compassion and layers of character that none of his action blockbusters allowed him to.

“The Debt,” a very good 2007 Israeli thriller with Cold War and Holocaust connections, earns a nerve-wracking and entertaining Hollywood remake.

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Irish police sergeant Gerry Boyle may be “the last of the independents.” But this boozy, bluff and blunt redhead sure is a hard man t’love.

He’s a racist — or at least is very comfortable coming off that way. For shock value, don’t you know.

“I thought only black lads were drug dealers. And Mexicans.”

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In a remote snowy forest in the far north, a figure in camouflage stalks a reindeer with bow and arrow. An arrow flies, the deer tumbles off across a lake to die an agonizing death. But the hunter, a teenage girl , gives chase.

“I just missed your heart,” she observes, and then dispatches the beast, skins and dresses it. Her dad (Eric Bana) is the only one not impressed at her prowess. He’s given to ambushing her like Kato in the “Pink Panther” movies — constantly testing her, their knife fights preparing her for the ugly outside world he’s protected her from all her life.

“You must always be ready,” he warns. “Adapt. Or die!”

What he has raised here north of the Arctic Circle is a strong, resourceful and remorseless killing machine. And what he has in mind for her is the heart of “Hanna,” a furious neck-snapping thriller that summons up memories of a dozen other movies and manages to improve on most of them.

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Snippets of Ron Howard’s upcoming Formula 1 racing film “Rush,” about the James Hunt/Niki Lauda rivalry during the sport’s last Golden Age, had me hankering to re-watch the movie it will be compared to — John Frankenheimer’s 1966 SuperPanavision epic, “Grand Prix.”
It’s still the gold standard for racing movies, a film which was decades ahead of its time in terms of on-track realism. It’s only recently that Fox’s TV racing coverage, with miniature cameras everywhere, has caught up with what Frankenheimer and his team were able to pull off with huge, clunky film cameras way back in the day.

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In those heady days after “The Messenger,” director Oren Moverman, Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster cooked up what seems — on paper– like a sure Oscar nomination for Harrelson. He’d star in a “Training Day” character study of a bad/good cop set against L.A.’s Rampart division police scandal.
But the movie that came from that idea is a bit all over the place — juggling many themes, many ideas, many layers of personal corruption leavened by a hint of righteousness. And you can’t get a bead on the character because Woody & Co. (James “L.A. Confidential” Ellroy co-wrote the script) are so ambivalent about him.

Before he was Mad Eye Moody, before he took Colin Farrell to the woodshed “In Bruges,” before “The Guard,” the great Irish actor Brendan Gleeson was the infamous Irish crook known as “The General.”
Director John Boorman cast Gleeson in the title role in this 1998 film, Gleeson’s big break, which is now on Netflix and well work a look.
Gleeson plays Martin Cahill, a notorious but also colorful Dublin thief and thug. Gleeson plays him with a playful swagger. The General was a fellow who planned and carried out robberies big and small –hitting a huge jewelry store, stealing a collection of famous paintings from a museum. He had a touch of the Robin Hood, or at least the lower class rebel about him.
They’re tearing down his subsidized housing complex? He defiantly stays on, refuses to leave, even after the building is destroyed and he has to move into a tent. He’s hounded, around the clock, by the cops who target him (Jon Voight leads them). He finds ingenious ways to slip under fences, invite a mob of friends over, putting them in matching sweatshirts and masks so the cops don’t know who to follow when they all leave the house.
Boorman makes great sport of Cahill’s ways of outsmarting the Gardai — the state police — driving all over creation until they run out of gas. Refilling his own tank and ditching them. The fellow comes as beloved, so adored that his adoring wife ( Maria Doyle Kennedy) gives him permission to carry on an affair with her younger sister (Angeline Ball).

But as with any Hollywood film of a famous criminal, there’s a lot of  sanitizing going on. The violence of the cops is played up, and Cahill’s violence is downplayed — kidnapping, a bombing, etc.

The British food critic/chef and TV personality Nigel Slater’s memoir is the subject of “Toast,”an oddly under-motivated biographical account of a boys’ love of his culinarily hapless mother and his war with the woman who would replace her in his family after her death.
Nigel (Oscar Kennedy) grew up middle class in the Britain of the 1960s and 70s — Dad (Ken Stott) drove off to work in his Rover 3.5, and came home to an only child son he didn’t understand. And sickly stay-at-home mum (Victoria) was so hapless in the kitchen she couldn’t be bothered to open the cans of whatever canned meal she was cooking, a helplessness that the movie doesn’t deign to explain.