Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin
Sonar pinging! Torpedoes whirring! Klaxons sounding! Talk of bow thrusters, dive angles and taking the conn!
So what if the past 45 years or so have been fallow times for undersea warfare. Stick a broom on the projector and sail back into port, everybody; this is first-rate adventure stuff, an all-missions-accomplished submarine movie.
As far as character development goes, things never get much past the name, rank and serial-number level. The Soviet characters display a seemingly whimsical tendency to vary among (1) talking to each other in Russian with subtitles, (2) talking to each other in English and (3) responding in English when American characters talk to them in Russian with subtitles. And the dialogue by screenwriters Larry (The Presidio) Ferguson and Donald (Missing) Stewart sounds as if it comes from G.I. Joe cartoons: "When you're playing chicken, you've got to know when to flinch."
Nonetheless, director John (Die Hard) McTiernan bypasses the high-tech jargon of the Tom Clancy novel the story comes from and gets to the point: A Soviet sub captain, whose vessel is powered by a new silent propulsion system, is on his way to defect to the U.S. The Soviets want to sink him; so do a lot of Americans.
The chase is on, and a most tensely mounted one it is.
McTiernan makes good use of his actors. Connery, as the Soviet captain, has no problem acting resolute; Baldwin (Beetle-juice) adds a bemused quality to his role as a CIA analyst. Both actors finesse their characters' implausibilities.
The supporting cast is shipshape, especially Richard (The Secret of My Success) Jordan as a cynical presidential adviser; Jordan has only a few scenes but he sets them to crackling. Sturdy too are Scott (The Right Stuff) Glenn as a U.S. submariner, James Earl Jones as the CIA chief and Sam Neill as Connery's first officer. (Ex-Watergate lawyer Fred Thompson, overplaying as an American admiral, is an exception, chewing on his drawl as if he's imitating Joe Don Baker.)
The Soviet government has acknowledged that Clancy's plot is not all that unlikely: A mutinous Soviet officer took over a destroyer in 1975, apparently intending to defect. But even without that verisimilitude, this would be an ideal guys-night-out movie. Make room in the pen that includes Above Us the Waves, Destination Tokyo, Operation Pacific, Up Periscope, Run Silent, Run Deep and the 1968 Rock Hudson vehicle, Ice Station Zebra (which Red October resembles). This one's a classic too. (PG)
Patrick Dempsey, Arye Gross, Daniel Stern
Insufferably disputatious, this film is about three hateful brothers who argue over stupid things for an hour and a half. Watching it is like being in a garage where three distemperate dogs are fighting. Give credit to writer Mike Binder (a former actor) and director Joe (Revenge of the Nerds II) Roth: At least they let you know what's coming in the prologue, which shows brothers squabbling as youngsters.
Then it's 1962, and Dempsey, as the punky young brother, Gross, as the nerdy collegian, and Stern, as an Air Force sergeant, pile into a car their father wants them to drive from Detroit to Florida. A few subplot scenes are set in Florida, where Dad, Alan Arkin, has retired. But he devotes his time to arguing with his brother, Joe Bologna—"Putz!" is the intellectual level of things. There's no relief from the Three Stoogey squabbling.
Dempsey, Gross and Stern argue—in nose-twisting fashion—about how quickly they should eat, who should drive, what to listen to on the radio, whether to smoke, how fast they should go. (The sloppiness of this ordeal is typified by a motel scene where the boys watch baseball on TV. The announcer is describing a Dodgers-Cubs game, with Sandy Koufax pitching to Cal Neeman, while the screen shows Koufax pitching to Roger Maris of the Yankees.)
This all leads to a few minutes of sentiment sappy enough to have oozed from a tree. But audience hearts have been too numbed by the incessant arguments to warm to the inevitable reconciliation.
Dempsey (Loverboy) and Stern (Leviathan) are capable; so is Gross (Tequila Sunrise), though his love scene with Annabeth Gish is a bit lame. There's really nothing to be done for this movie, anyway. A lemon by any other name...(PG-13)
David Cronenberg
A slash or two above the usual run of garish-ghouly-gory thrillers, this production lacks both substance and style, but it is true to its own freakish vision.
The makeup effects are well done, especially if your tastes run to characters with worms coming out of their necks and heads in their stomachs. The hellish sets are 13 or 14 levels below anything Dante ever imagined. Cronenberg, best known for directing the 1986 remake of The Fly, is wonderfully creepy as a psychopath masquerading as a soft-spoken therapist.
When all is said and disemboweled, though, this remains a flamboyantly gruesome, masochistic movie that depends on shock value more than anything else.
The plot involves a young Canadian couple, adequately acted by Craig Sheffer and Anne Bobby. He's having nightmares of a place called Midian, a refuge for monsters. Then Cronenberg frames him for some murders. The police kill Sheffer, who returns to life and heads into the depths of the real Midian. (Tourists may want to note that it's near Edmonton.)
Director Clive (Hellraiser) Barker, adapting his own novel Cabal, is unrelenting. Shoot-outs and gross-outs alternate until an enigmatic ending paves the way for Nightbreed II, should it come to that. Sheffer seems to represent a monster messiah; Cronenberg becomes a devil symbol. The film's dark, religious overtones recall the 1933 Charles Laughton-Bela Lugosi classic Island of Lost Souls, but suggestion sufficed in that ancient, relatively naive era of entertainment. These days, if a berserk type decides to scalp himself, we get to see it. Lucky us. (R)
Rob Lowe, James Spader
It strains credibility, of course, to think sweet-faced, sweet-smiling Rob Lowe (see page 58) could be a manipulative, unscrupulous guy, the sort to videotape his friends having sex. Otherwise, this is an ingratiatingly perverse, well-contoured thriller.
The obvious parallel is to Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, with Lowe insinuating himself into the confidence of Spader (sex, lies, and videotape), a wimpy investment analyst. Soon Lowe involves Spader in drug abuse, robbery, sexual adventure and murder; Spader finally realizes Lowe is a devil who'll want his due any day.
Directed by Curtis (The Bedroom Window) Hanson and written by David (Apartment Zero) Koepp, the film is focused and internally consistent. Lowe is eerily seductive, and Spader subtly works out of his Milquetoast mode. Spader's snively brother is nicely played by Christian (Broadcast News) Clemenson.
The movie lapses into overt philosophizing at the end, when Lowe sneers, "People are such hypocrites. They walk through their whole lives playing innocent. But they're not innocent." It's only a brief sermon, though, and not wholly out of order in a film that suggests vividly how easily led into temptation we are. (R)
>DROPPED BALL: FIELD OF DREAMS In a sermon on the gospel according to wishful thinking, Kevin Costner plays an Iowa farmer who hears a disembodied voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield. He follows orders, and soon phantoms of lots of old major leaguers, including Shoeless Joe Jackson (played, with glove on the wrong hand, by Ray Liotta), show up. So does Kevin's dad, whose flawed parental techniques led to this whole Freud-meets-Abner Doubleday mess. (MCA)
IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY? MILLENNIUM Cheryl Ladd comes back from the dismal world of 2989 to dally with Kris Kristofferson and try to rewrite history. They seem like two grown-ups who find themselves acting in a second-grade play. (IVE)
VANISHED WITHOUT A TRACE
Heartbreak & Hope
After Jaycee Dugard's rescue, a look at the cases of six young people who went missing in 2009
