movie reviews: margin call, colombiana

Margin Call is a perfectly solid movie.  But as it stands, it should have premiered last Saturday night on HBO instead of being released in theaters last Friday.  Pensive and cautious in its approach, the movie covers a 24 hour period leading up to the financial meltdown of Fall, 2008.  Tension is immediately established when a team of efficiency experts raid an investment firm’s trading floor and lays off more than half of the employees.  Among those let go is Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), who, ironically, leads the risk management team.  Before he is escorted out of the office, he slips a data drive to Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), asking him to look over some puzzling data and subsequently warns him to, “Be careful.”  This is an intriguing setup.  What I had expected to follow was a movie working a long con.  That is, things set into motion for a big payoff.  Instead, I got a procedural.  One that, in the most rudimentary sense, partially explains the credit crisis that has a direct hand in our current economic shitstorm.  But so what?  A dry, conflict-free flowchart of who did what can hold a TV audience in place for an hour or so, but not someone who’s watching a movie.  Good acting by Tucci, Quinto, Jeremy Irons, and Paul Bettany can only get you so far.  In fact, there have been two shows that already aired on PBS that kicked this movie’s ass in the drama and thrill department – they were both “Frontline” documentaries on the credit fallout and its aftermath.  Good intentions can get you only so far when it comes to filmmaking.  Time for the writer/director, JC Chandor, to take a refresher course in screenwriting.  (The trailer below, btw, is pretty much the movie.)

Of all the fast food franchises, I think Taco Bell understands its products the best.  Their idea is painfully simple:  take the same old ingredients, layer them differently, give it a name, and sell the shit out of it.  Everything begins as a taco or a burrito.  Put the filling in a flatbread, and you’ve got a Gordita.  Put it on a fried flatbread, and you’ve got a Chalupa.  Put the hard taco shell inside a tortilla, and you’ve got a Crunchwrap supreme.  This is the same approach that Luc Besson and his frequent writing partner, Robert Mark Kamen, emulate to an excruciatingly familiar degree.  Together, they’ve written, among others, The Transporter (all three), Taken, and Colombiana, an actioner that features Zoe Saldana.  In all of their films, there are only three kinds of people:  Killers, cops, and bimbos.  (There’s actually a fourth kind, and that’s the ignorant immigrant, but I won’t get into that now.)  It’s just a matter of deciding who’s who.  In this one, Saldana plays the killer, the British character actor, Lennie James, plays the cop, and Michael Vartan, plays the bimbo.  Vartan is hilarious in this movie, mainly because he seems confused playing the vapid whore and not the gun-slinging hero.  Honestly, he seems completely clueless.  Saldana has appeared in some big hits, but she doesn’t have much of a persona – until this movie.  She’s lean, mean, and ready to kill in some ridiculous ways.  Finding different ways to kill people seems to be the real theme of this movie.  Actually, it’s a theme that often gets visited in Besson’s picture, and it was never done better than in Leon.  But that movie had a special blend of camp and intensity.  Also, it had Gary Oldman at his peak.  While Colombiana is nowhere near as polished or as interesting as that film, much like Taco Bell, it could just hit the spot, even if it does leave you with a little bit of indigestion.