This week, Rob Brown dons the jersey of college football icon Ernie Davis in The Express; more people meet their end at the hands of Jigsaw in Saw V; and Mark Wahlberg grimaces his way through Max Payne.
The Express
Universal
$29.98
Blu-ray: $39.98
Plot: In the early 1960s, Syracuse University running back Ernie Davis defied on and off-field prejudice to set college football records, eventually becoming the first African-American football player to win the prized Heisman trophy.
Opinion: Even though the story Ernie Davis has never been told on the big screen before, it’s hard to watch The Express without feeling a certain sense of déjà vu. Just take a look at the plot elements for a second. A ’60s-era black athlete encountering prejudice in a white-dominated sport? Wasn’t that movie called Glory Road? A gruff coach whose views on life and the game are changed forever thanks to one great player? Sounds a lot like Hoosiers. A football legend-in-the-making whose career is tragically cut short by cancer? I saw that in Brian’s Song! Still, a clichéd sports movie can still be a good sports movie if its got the right combination of strong performances, a compelling personal story and tense game play. And fortunately The Express has got all three. As Davis, Finding Forrester’s Rob Brown cuts a charismatic figure on and off the football field, while Dennis Quaid lends his usual authority to the role of Syracuse’s famous coach, Ben Schwartzwalder. (The other notable performance comes from Darrin DeWitt Henson as Syracuse veteran Jim Brown; although he doesn’t really resemble the football legend, Henson does capture the sheer force of Brown’s personality.) Their relationship forms the heart of The Express, lending the movie an emotional weight that guides it through some of its rougher patches. Despite its flaws, the film does its best to honor this groundbreaking player’s memory.
Bonus Features: Several featurettes devoted to the real Ernie Davis, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of the football sequences. Deleted scenes and a director’s commentary track round out the extras
Verdict: Buy It
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Saw V
Lionsgate
Standard: $29.95
Collector’s Box: $39.95
Blu-ray: $39.99
Plot: After surviving one of Jigsaw’s traps, Agent Strahm (Scott Patterson) tries to prove that Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) is continuing the legacy of the supposedly dead serial killer.
Opinion: I’m on record as not being a fan of the Saw movies, but I have to admit that I had fun with Saw V, the strongest entry in the series since Saw II. For starters, this latest installment boasts some of the franchise’s most creative traps, which deliver on the requisite gore factor, but also demand some thought on behalf of the unlucky souls caught in them. More importantly, the plot actually makes some semblance of sense here, unlike Saw IV where I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Not that Saw V‘s storyline is particularly complex, but the film does have a scene-to-scene continuity that its predecessor lacked. No doubt getting a new director behind the camera helped inject some energy back into the proceedings. Outgoing director Darren Lynn Bousman (who helmed Saw II through IV) grew increasingly disinterested in the series with each film and by the time he got to Saw IV, he almost seemed to be directing from his trailer. So the producers tapped Bousman’s production designer David Hackl to take over this time around and while he’s no Martin Scorsese, he’s clearly more engaged with the material than his predecessor would have been. The big problem with Saw V—and with the franchise as a whole—is that the producers are getting too obsessed with creating a larger mythology out of what are fairly simple slasher stories. There are numerous plot points introduced in this film that won’t be answered until the next installment (due out in October ’09 as usual), which, quite frankly, is pretty annoying. At this point, I don’t really care what’s in the box that Jigsaw left for his ex-wife or which random police officer will become a major character in Saw VI. Leave that kind of serialized storytelling to television shows and focus on what you sometimes do well: finding new ways to kill people.
Bonus Features: Even though the movies have been of mixed quality, the Saw commentary tracks are always fun to listen to. Bousman, for example, spent the majority of his Saw III and IV commentaries bitching about what the studio wouldn’t let him do, while the producers countered his complaints on their separate audio commentaries. The Saw V commentary tracks—one of which features Hackle and his first assistant director Steve Webb, while the other stars producers Oren Koules and Mark Burg—are gentler affairs, but they still include lots of interesting behind-the-scenes tidbits. Also included are five making-of featurettes devoted to each of the film’s major traps.
Verdict: Rent It
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Max Payne
Fox
$29.98
Blu-ray: $39.98
Plot: After the murder of his wife and infant daughter, New York City cop Max Payne devotes his life to killing bad guys with a variety of different guns.
Opinion: “Enough of this shit,” a random dude with a gun shouts somewhere the middle of Max Payne, a big-screen version of the popular PC action game. All I can say is: right on random dude! Even by the low standards set by such awful video game based movies as Doom, Silent Hill and Super Mario Bros., Max Payne is a turd of epic proportions. It’s not just that the story is incomprehensible, the film also fails as a mindless action flick. Director John Moore has no conception of how to choreograph and shoot the movie’s big set-pieces, instead relying on tired Matrix-esque slow-motion shots and lots of random gunfire to do the heavy lifting for him. Don’t look to the movie’s star to save the day either. As bad as Wahlberg was in The Happening earlier this year, he’s even worse here, forcing his mouth into a perpetual scowl and squinting constantly in a desperate effort to come across like a badass. Or maybe he’s just pissed off that he let his entourage talk him into appearing in this dud. Even Vincent Chase was smart enough to turn down Matterhorn. What’s Wahlberg’s excuse?
Bonus Features: Moore joins the film’s production designer and visual effects supervisor on a commentary track; an animated graphic novel provides backstory absent from the film and a making-of featurette chronicles the film’s production.
Verdict: Skip It
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Also on DVD
Two contenders for future cult moviedom arrive on DVD this week after disappointing theatrical runs in late ’08. The family-friendly sci-fi adventure City of Ember (Fox, $29.99) takes place in an underground city illuminated by dazzling lights. But when the generators that power these bulbs start to fail, it’s up to two precocious children to figure out a way to save their civilization. Director Gil Kenan (who previously helmed the animated film Monster House) and has frequently spoken of his love for early ’80s kids flicks and this one definitely has a Goonies vibe to it. Hopefully fans of those movies will check this one out on DVD. Similarly, expect devotees of The Rocky Horror Picture show to host screening parties of Repo! The Genetic Opera (Lionsgate, $19.98), ex-Saw director Darren Lynn Bousman’s futuristic rock opera set in a world where recipients of new organs are forced to pay exorbitant fees for their life-saving surgeries. If they miss their payments, their new heart/lung/kidney etc. is repossessed by a scalpel-wielding repo man. Although the film itself is nowhere near as cool as this synopsis makes it sound, it does offer some fun tunes and inventive production and costume design. I just with Bousman knew how to make a film that doesn’t look like another Saw sequel. The 2005 Ryan Gosling/Rachel McAdams romance The Notebook already has a sizeable fanbase on DVD, which is why Warner Brothers is reissuing the film in a special Limited Edition Giftset (Warner Brothers, $29.98), which comes with a stationary set and separate scrapbook for making your own photo albums—but then, who makes photo albums anymore in this age of Flickr? Finally, the National Lampoon brand lives on with National Lampoon’s Stoned Age (Paramount, $29.98), a B.C.-era comedy about a doltish caveman and the cavewoman (Ali Larter) he loves. Boy…quite a comedown from the glory days of the Vacation movies, huh?
