Battle: Los Angeles (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Jonathan Liebesman. Starring Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Bridget Moynahan.
An attempt to cross Independence Day with Starship Troopers and a hell of a lot of shakeycam.
Battle: Los Angeles is another America-saves-the-world sci-fi death-fest about an alien invasion that targets coastal cities. The action follows-and never leaves-the perspective of a squad of marines assigned to protect Los Angeles. It's a classic shift in focus from the epic scale of '90s action blockbusters to the dirty, on-the-ground angle favored by whatever decade we're in now.
The aliens, apparently, are after our water. They use it as a fuel source, and our ocean levels are "already dropping" within a day of their arrival. This doesn't make very much sense, but these days I'm inclined to give a pass to any invasion plot that's less stupid than the one in Signs.
In any case, all of these sci-fi bits are purely decorative. The enemy soldiers are gooier and their weapons are a little flashier than your standard human troops, but nothing they do is much outside the scope of an ordinary battlefield. Battle: LA is essentially a standard war film with all the tricky moral questions removed, leaving the skeleton of a guilt-free action movie. Some of the more popular and brainless first-person shooter video games are a likely influence.
There's nothing really wrong with this. Battle: LA does what it does well, swiftly pacing scenes of alternating action and tension. It's not even as dumb as it might have been. Despite the stereotypical assortment of multicultural marine grunts established at the outset, the filmmakers seem to go out of their way to defy some of the more obvious genre clichés. Michelle Rodriguez, for example, plays a tough-talking female soldier who doesn't die!
There's nothing really original here, but it's not half bad.
Rated PG-13 for failure to respect the sanctity of interstellar life.
3.5 out of 5
Kill the Irishman (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Jonathan Hensleigh. Starring Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken, Vincent D'Onofrio.
Historical gangster film with a cheap feel.
Irish-American thug Danny Greene rises through the ranks of Cleveland's union and organized crime scene in the 1960s and 70s, along the way becoming a media darling and the target of half the gangsters in the city.
Danny is a colorful character with a colorful life story, and this is the film's saving grace. A weak script, flat visuals, unimaginative direction, and subpar acting (despite a pretty talented cast) drag things in the other direction.
Kill the Irishman revolves around its treatment of Danny as a folk hero, but it never gets around to justifying this image. The Irishman is implied to be clever and ambitious, yet each of his successes seems to fall into his lap. Any evidence of his alleged charm, negotiation skills, and philanthropy is cut away or buried into cheesy musical montages. Mostly we just see him punching people in the face.
The script, co-written by the film's low-rent director, Jonathan Hensleigh, is a jumble of tenuously-drawn ideas and half-finished inserts like detective Joe Manditski (Val Kilmer), who narrates the movie, shows up in four or five scenes, and serves no purpose whatsoever in the end.
Characters are developed clumsily, as with the wise old woman who tells Danny something along the lines of "There is good in you, I can see it."
Not without its merits, but they probably aren't worth seeking out.
Rated R for equal-opportunity killing.
2.5 out of 5
