Ridley Scott's "The Counselor" leaves me in great need of counseling...

Here's a recipe for a Can't-Miss "Great Hollywood Film" - 1.) take an original screenplay from Cormac McCarthy, the author of such hallmarks of recent American literature as "The Road," "Blood Meridian" and "The Sunset Limited."  2.) Get epic-master Ridley Scott, the director of such crowd-pleasers as Gladiator, Alien and Blade Runner to direct.  3.) Assemble an all-star cast consisting of Oscar winners and nominees like Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt to bring the story to life.  Your result from mixing all these ingredients will without a doubt get you one of the greatest films ever made, no matter what they turn out, right?  Right?  Well...

I watched The Counselor around 8:00 on a Sunday evening, and I am writing this review about eighteen hours later.  I watched the unrated, extended home video edit of the film, not the version that played in theaters last fall and was so savaged by critics and what few moviegoers paid to see it.  I watched it without distraction and without interruption, so as to assure my full attention be devoted to it.  As a result, I have suffered a mostly-sleepless night afterward, having the reprehensible things depicted in this movie invade my dreams and keep me awake for a lot longer than a more enjoyable movie would.  I have struggled to decide just what I think, or more simply, how I even feel, about this film.  I’m still struggling, but perhaps crafting this essay will help me decide just what my final opinion should be. 

The Counselor weaves a tale (or tries to) of the titular El Paso lawyer (Fassbender), who is never referred to by any name other than “Counselor,” planning on making some sort of drug deal with a powerful, shadowy Mexican cartel; a one-time occurrence that will theoretically set up him and his bride-to-be (Penelope Cruz) financially for life.  Since he can only afford to fly to Amsterdam and buy a 3-carat stone for her engagement ring, he apparently needs the money something fierce.  He works with a fairly successful drug-dealer acquaintance (Bardem) and a middleman connection to the cartel (Pitt) to make a sale to dealers in Chicago.  Through a series of double-crosses and mistaken assumptions, the Counselor quickly finds just how incredibly naive he has been, how hopeless his predicament is, and how many people will suffer the consequences of his decisions. 

The plot, as much of one as there is, is fairly simple, and mostly unnecessary, as the bare-bones story structure is mostly a means to provide these characters opportunities to have McCarthy-esque philosophical conversations with one another, so I’ll spare you any deeper summarization than that.  Save for a few minor action/violence scenes to bridge scenes of dialogue, the film flows more like one of McCarthy’s stage plays, with a great number of scenes consisting primarily of two characters talking at great length. Of course, there is that much-talked-about scene with Cameron Diaz doing… oh, how shall I say it?... gynecologically immoral things to the windscreen of a Ferrari, but even that scene is a talking scene, a flashback playing over Javier Bardem’s character talking about the event to the Counselor. 

Cormac McCarthy always populates his stories with morally bankrupt figures, and he may have surpassed his quota here.  There are no redeemable characters to be found anywhere in this film, save for the Counselor’s poor fiancee’, although one might could claim the level of her innocence/naivete’ is almost so pathetically great that she deserves what she gets, too.  Cameron Diaz’ portrayal of the cheetah-spot tattooed, cheetah-keeping girlfriend/business manager Malkina is so vampy that it’s either a brilliant acting choice or her acknowledging the absurdity of the character, but I’m not sure which.  Even Brad Pitt is not stretching his acting chops much, as he seems to be pretty much playing the same character he portrayed in Thelma & Louise twenty-two years earlier, but perhaps twenty-two years older, and in the only place in life that character could’ve ended up.  Fassbender and Bardem, however, do a credible job, Bardem in particular chewing the scenery enough to convey his character’s feelings of inferiority when next to the sexually and intellectually superior Malkina. 

I can’t imagine that any of Cormac McCarthy’s written work would translate word-for-word to an audible presentation in any conversationally believable manner.  Now, I’ve never heard any of his works in audiobook form, so I suppose I can’t rule out that medium as a possible mean of enjoying his complex dialogue, but there is a reason that (until now) he has never penned the screenplay for any of his other works adapted to film.  Sure, previous movies based on his books are notable for characters waxing philosophic in rather dreary/poetic ways (think Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men or Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses), but the screenwriters of those films did a pretty reasonable job of following the Less-is-More rule.  The Counselor, being straight from Cormac McCarthy’s own hand, has no such filter, and for whatever reason, it seems Ridley Scott decided to film every bleepin’ word McCarthy wrote.  For example, Ruben Blades is in only one scene of the movie, speaking to the Counselor over the phone, giving a lengthy Hispanic/New Age-ish existential assessment of the Counselor’s situation, ending by quoting some obscure Mexican poet at length, (literally) driving the Counselor to tears.  Hell, it almost drove ME to tears. 

Avarice seems to be the focal point of whatever moral lesson the film wishes to teach. All of these characters are fabuloulsly wealthy by most any rational person’s definition of the word, yet all of the poor decisions, shady dealings and violent acts the characters exhibit are in pursuit of even greater riches.  The drug trade is the means to that end in this movie, but we never see any drug deals or (with one very brief exception) even any drug use.  There isn’t anything one could construe as a just ending for any of the characters here, so Scott or McCarthy certainly didn’t have any notions of delivering any sort of emotionally satisfying experience to an audience. It seems their only definition of success they possibly could have hoped to achieve was to deliver a blistering morality tale about the inevitable outcome of unchecked greed, and on that level, I suppose I must grant that they did succeed.

In the interest of full disclosure, I remind you that Ridley Scott is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, so take my views on his work with whatever grains of salt you wish.  His work the last ten years has been spotty, as I acknowledge that his last great work was probably Kingdom of Heaven (and even the theatrical release of that film had structural problems; it was his Director’s Cut that made it to home video that restored lots of excised footage and produced a wonderful film).  Each of his films since, with the possible exception of A Good Year, has had script or story structure problems, probably culminating with how almost-incomprehensible Prometheus turned out to be.  He continues to be the consummate visual artist he has always been, however.  I challenge anyone to deny ALL of his films are visual feasts, and The Counselor is no exception, but I wonder why it seems he cannot identify weak screenplays as he advances in years. There are so many scenes and characters in the Blu-ray version of this movie that serve absolutely no purpose in driving the narrative that I wonder how much Scott’s long-time editor Pietro Scalia was actually in the cutting room during post-production.  Malkina’s visit to a confessional to tease a priest and a scene with John Leguizamo and Dean Norris discussing bodies in barrels are just two such scenes that should have been the first to go.

Did I like The Counselor?  I don’t think this movie is really meant to be “liked.”  It is possible that it is meant to be admired, or even respected.  In the end, it seemed to me that Scott and McCarthy were more intent on illustrating how God laughs at us when we make plans than they were on providing us a tale of redemption from evil or growth from baser desires.  I suppose it is a testament to Scott’s power as a filmmaker that, even in his mid-seventies, he still has the sway to get such a film financed, attract such a cast and get such a story on film despite its obvious shortcomings.   

I can say positive things about the stellar cast and how wonderful a job they all did with what they were given to do.  I can rave about Scott’s gorgeous use of the desert landscapes and corresponding color palettes to make yet another visually luscious film. I can’t see how I could bring myself to say I liked it, however.  As a fan of Ridley Scott, I’m glad I saw it, but I don’t think I’ll be making a point of watching it again.  I’ve lost enough sleep over it already.

Marvel does it again with "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"

The concept of Freedom-versus-Security has been prevalent in the popular discussion to varying degrees for the last decade and a half, perhaps at its most heated these last couple years thanks to the doings of Edward Snowden.  There are some who claim that when our society cried “never again” after that day in September of 2001, we began the possibly-irreversible process of willingly surrendering our freedoms in exchange for some sense of safety.  Perhaps the deep thinkers among us wouldn’t think of looking to an entry in the Marvel cinematic universe for an illustration of this concept, but in a rather simplified fashion, that is just what we find in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  

While nobody would confuse this movie with such 1970s political conspiracy thrillers as The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, there is a similar vibe running through The Winter Soldier that sets it apart from earlier Marvel films, and makes it possibly the best Marvel film since the first Iron Man movie.  The fear of spoilers shall keep me from outlining the plot of the movie in too much detail, but I suspect that most of those reading this will have a fairly good notion of what’s going on.  Even if you are not pre-educated about the particulars of Captain America’s literary universe, however, this follow-up to the first Captain America solo film three years ago probably serves you better than most of the other Marvel movies, as one could come into this movie cold and not find it very difficult to keep up.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo and their screenwriters pull off a pretty nifty balancing act, moving the film along from action set piece to action set piece with actual interesting character development, and the development of SEVERAL characters who are dramatically limited by our knowing they will all be included in future movies.  We all read IMdB, so we know who the “Winter Soldier” turns out to be.  We all know (or can surmise) who will turn out to be the movie’s ultimate villain.  We all know that Cap and Natasha and Falcon and Fury will all survive (although one supporting character who has shown up on the S.H.I.E.L.D. television show a couple of times this year did bite the big one in this movie, much to my surprise… oops, Spoiler… sorry).  The trick is telling us a great story and taking us on a cinematic ride despite those limitations, and the Russos manage to do the job.

Here we find “Captain” Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) farther along in his acclimation to modern life than he was when we last saw him in The Avengers, even keeping a small notebook of things he makes a point of researching (the “Rocky” movies, the music of Marvin Gaye, etc.).  He meets Army veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), who will later become the mechanically-winged Falcon, at the beginning of the story, and it is the proverbial Start of a Beautiful Friendship that helps humanize this story and keep it from devolving into a mere collection of action set-pieces. Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow also comes to this movie and provides enough one-liner delivering and wire-work butt-kicking to make it apparent that a lack of her OWN film is something that must be rectified at some point, in my humble opinion.  Thankfully, the chemistry these three actors share, conveying so much of their communication with each other via glances and body language, does a lot to keep the story actually being about something a little more human.  

Samuel L. Jackson’s S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury gets to chew up and spit out dialogue yet again, as only Jackson can do, but he has a bit more plot-driving function in this script than he did in The Avengers, as well as revealing a bit more about the character.  He is even the focal point of perhaps the best action sequence of the movie, a machine-gun filled car chase throughout the streets of Washington, DC (well, it was actually Cleveland, but we can all pretend) where we first run across the metal-armed assassin, the “Winter Soldier.”  

With all that being said, it saddens me to report that Robert Redford is probably the weakest link in this stellar cast.  Playing a S.H.I.E.L.D. executive uber-boss, he definitely embodies a shadier character than he has since Indecent Proposal.  While Redford may be a living movie legend, he wanders through this movie in a vague, stern-grandfatherly manner, never getting very animated, even when the plot may require it, and never totally convincing me he knew what exactly to do with the role.  I’ve always thought him a rather “cold” actor, and that was pretty apparent here.  His final line of dialogue in the film, which I am reluctant to reveal for spoilering reasons, fell so totally flat with me that I almost groaned, but that was the only such moment.

I thoroughly enjoyed this entry in the Marvel movie saga.  I darn well should, as I am exactly the audience at which it is aimed (well, almost - I’m probably about twenty years older than the target demographic, but I fit the criteria in all other respects).   Long-time comics reader that I am, I loved the tone of the story and thought the shoot-’em-up/blow-’em-up sequences to be fantastic, which is all one could ask of a superhero movie.  From crashing flying aircraft carriers to raging gun battles in city streets to a gang fight within the confines of a glass elevator, there is no shortage of kinetic energy here.

As it is an entry in an ongoing franchise of other films, while at the same time being another chapter in a series about one particular character, Winter Soldier operates under some restrictions to which even a rather formulaic series as the James Bond films are not subject.  How well the movie managed to tell a quality story that felt topical and relevant, and also managed to keep me in suspense and throw some surprises at me, is a testament to the creative team’s abilities.

"Divergent", or "How To Survive the Apocalypse and Still Get to Kiss a Boy."

So this is what it looks like when the Age of Teenaged Boys in movie culture starts to ebb, and the Age of Teenaged Girls begins to rise.  One might even wonder just when this Dystopia-for-Girls fad will come to an end.  Through how many games must we go hungry, or through how many mazes must we run, before we pass puberty and get to wear black leather, get cool tattoos, hang with vampires, lose our virginity and overthrow all the fascist societies current popular fiction can throw at us?  Geez, Louise, but if Mad Max stumbled across some place like these supposedly-dystopian cultures during his wanderings after the bombs fell, he’d get disgusted pretty dang quickly and run back to Thunderdome with a smile.

Well, anyways, here comes the first installment of the latest “Young Adult” film franchise, Divergent, based on a fairly-popular recent novel by Veronica Roth.  At some point a hundred or so years in our future, after some “war” that resulted in all of the world except Chicago becoming uninhabitable (yeah, Chicago – go figure), we find what’s left of humanity all under the age of thirty (or at least it looks like the vast majority of it is – maybe this is after the Logan’s Run experiment failed) and divided into five “factions,” each of which serves a different purpose in society.  Those factions are Abnegation (the selfless servants, and the faction currently governing), Amity (the kind and charitable), Candor (the honest, mostly lawyers), Erudite (the intelligent and scholarly) and Dauntless (the brave, which in this world means the soldiers and cops, but these soldiers/cops are all into free-running for some reason).  Sadly, some folks don’t fit into any of these, and remain “faction-less” (or “bums,” as some of us might have called them).

As children reach the age of sixteen, they are tested to see if they are better-suited to remain in the faction of their birth for the remainder of their lives, or if they may have attributes that would be better put to use in another faction.  By some quirk of law, however, when the day comes for them to submit to the ceremony that assigns them to their future faction, they are free to choose ANY faction.  This testing procedure sometimes reveals a child who is “divergent,” meaning that he or she doesn’t fit into any of society’s molds, and is quickly eliminated in the interest of maintaining social order.

Along comes Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley), from an Abnegation family, who takes the test and is found to be a Divergent.  The test’s administrator risks her own life by quelching the test’s result and sending Beatrice away, swearing her to secrecy.  When her Choosing Day comes, Beatrice surprises everyone by spurning her own faction and choosing to join the Dauntless (no doubt thrilled by the “bad boys” as every sixteen-year old girl ever born is).  Renaming herself “Tris,” she struggles against hostile drill sergeants, snotty fellow initiates and her attraction to an older instructor to become worthy of the thrill-seeking Dauntlesses.

The first half of the film moves along at a good pace, and while a little over-the-top in it’s trying to be allegorical about society’s labeling folks, I didn’t find it boring.  Seeing Tris begin to come of age and find a direction for her life held my interest, and for that, plenty of praise for Shailene Woodley is merited.  All too often, mid-twenty-somethings are asked to portray teenagers, but all too often, they aren’t convincing.  I did find it easy to accept the 22-year old Woodley as the late-teenaged Beatrice, however.  The flip side to this was twenty-eight year old Theo James as Four, Tris’s instructor/paramour.  Portraying some unspecified age that I took to be along the lines of twenty-four or twenty-five, he sorta gave me the willies with his Mad-Love for the seventeen or eighteen-year old Tris.  I guess guys will still go for high school-aged chicks even after the Apocalypse.

The second half of the movie got pretty silly (for lack of a more eloquent adjective), however, as Tris learns of the Erudites’ plan to use the Dauntlesses as an unwitting army in their plot to overthrow the Abnegations.  Her failure to succumb to some mind-control serum reveals her to be a Divergent, and thanks to some incredibly well-timed intervention from her Mommy, she manages to escape her own execution and lead the team of rebels who thwart the Erudites and start the resistance movement that presumably will someday free all the huddled masses from… blah, blah, blah…

Personally, I’ve always preferred to have the protagonist of any story I’m watching or reading find his/her own way out of trouble, and it’s pretty much always a turn-off when I see a “hero” having his/her fat pulled out of the proverbial fire by some random bit of luck or some other character conveniently swooping in at the precise moment said hero is about to get whacked.  But I digress…

There are several things to like about Divergent, despite my rolling my eyes at it a bit too often to declare it a success.  Shailene Woodley is terrific in the lead role, and if there is an actress who may be Jennifer Lawrence’s spiritual twin working in movies these days, she must be it.  Lenny Kravitz’ little girl Zoe as a fellow Dauntless initiate was also captivating, and thankfully, her role never degenerated into any sort of giggly BFF-type.  Kate Winslet, however, who was most likely cast with the intention of providing enough gravitas to make audiences think of the movie as something more than teenaged-fare, didn’t have much to work with, as her part as the Erudite leader was so undeveloped that it could’ve been played by just about any other capable film actress.

Director Neil Burger manages to tell a sort of coming-of-age story in such a way that even one such as I could remain interested, and I found the visual depiction of this city sealed off from the rest of the world very impressive, but the third act of the plot really spirals down to a Bella/Edward/Jacob level of drama, which plays better to schoolgirls on the printed page than to mass audiences on film.   Burger gave us the very interesting movie The Illusionist several years ago, and more recently, the mildly popular Bradley Cooper vehicle Limitless (which I have not yet seen, but about which I have heard good things), so despite my reservations about Divergent’s source material, I had higher hopes for this than I had for The Hunger Games (and let’s face it folks – without Hunger Games, there wouldn’t be any Divergent).  

I found myself asking questions of the movie that it never answered; namely about such things as details about this “war” that left Chicago in such dang good shape, and what awful things may lie beyond the microwave tower-looking fences that now surround the city.  Such answers are never given, or even hinted, but I will assume all that is to be fodder for the already-planned sequels next year and the year after that.  I recall having much the same number of questions about the universe of The Hunger Games, with a similar lack of answers there.  With how well this movie managed to pull off the details of this world, and even create a character that interested me, it was a disappointment that it didn’t manage to find a way to tell a story that didn’t make we wonder when the post-adolescent vampires were going to show up.

"Saving Mr. Banks" won't save you from needing a tissue...

You want a tear-jerker?  John Lee Hancock can make a tear-jerker.   Oh, yeah, sure, Saving Mr. Banks is a “Disney” picture, and that fact sells a lot more tickets than Mr. Hancock’s name does, I believe in giving praise where praise is due.  Although the director’s name is not featured in any of Disney’s promotion of Saving Mr. Banks, with the aid of a well-written script and some marvelous acting by a few of the finest film actors working today, Mr. Hancock has done it again.  If you saw The Rookie (the Dennis Quaid one, not the Clint Eastwood one) a decade or so ago, or The Blind Side more recently, then you know what I mean.  

This interpretation of the story of how Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) doggedly pursued and browbeat author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) into granting him the film rights to the first of her beloved children’s books featuring the supernanny Mary Poppins.  Armed with storyboards and songs already created for the proposed movie, he and his creative team try their darndest to convince Travers that her fears of her dearest creation being corrupted are unfounded, although they seemingly fail miserably in the attempt.  We see how some of everyone’s favorite tunes from the resulting movie were created, and how Mrs. Travers did her best to passively-aggressively sabotage Disney’s team’s efforts at almost every turn.

As we follow these events, we also see flashbacks to turn-of-the-(twentieth) century Australia, and how Mrs. Travers, then a mere child of eight years, shared a very close bond with her alcoholic father (Colin Farrell), as both father and daughter were dreamers incredibly vivid imaginations.   They travel to a small hamlet off in the Australian boondocks, apparently so the father can take a new job, and he does his best to make their near-poverty as bearable as possible with all sorts of make-believe tales with his daughters, but his ever-present flask of hooch and looks of disapproval from his wife shows us that he needs something more to dull the ache of his failures.  The events of Mrs. Travers’ childhood have such influence on her dealings with the Disney folks fifty years later that the two storylines are by necessity intertwined.

Tom Hanks may be a bit beefier in the face than Old Walt was, but his mannerisms are spot-on.  He is marvelous here, but we have come to expect nothing less from him. Emma Thompson also gives an awards-worthy performance, doing her usual fantastic job of portraying the “proper” English lady with something of an attitude.  With the pedigree of these two mega-star actors, my singing their praises would not give you any information that you would not already assume before seeing the movie, so I’ll use this space to give some kudos to Colin Farrell.

I’ve long thought that Farrell is one of the more under-appreciated film actors of this generation.  His films have rarely been huge commercial successes, and his sometimes tabloid-fodder personal life may keep him from receiving more accolades than he has to date, but his performance here just reaffirms my belief in his talent, primarily making an audience sympathetic to his character.  We saw it in In Bruges, we saw it (albeit briefly) in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, and even in London Boulevard (although it didn’t help that movie so much).  This movie is the high point of his career so far, in my humble opinion.

Although there are plenty of lighter moments in Saving Mr. Banks, it is a very touching story of must how much a child’s life is molded and shaped by his or her parents’ love, and how parents express that love.  The movie struck me with a notion that is probably so obvious to many of you - how grave a responsibility being a parent is; how every word spoken and action taken, especially those not even intended to be life lessons,  is absorbed by a child and used as a guideline for their own decision-making someday. P.L. Travers’ father, obviously a man who loved his children with a passion not many men may equal, used his imagination and love of tale-spinning not only to mold his daughter’s personality and set her course as a storyteller in her own right, but also as a means of getting his entire family through their difficult times.  

Of course, a movie like this could only have been made by the Disney studios.  The rights issues involved with Old Walt’s likeness alone mean that only the Mouse House could do it, but one would be hard-pressed to name another studio or production company who can create such a heart-warming tale.  If you can recall those live-action Disney films from the 60s like Follow me, Boys, or more recent ones like Invincible, then you’ll understand my meaning.  Especially touching is a scene in which Old Walt explains to Mrs. Travers that he finally understands the real meaning of Mary Poppins, and just how much it means to Mrs. Travers, and why he can be entrusted to translate that story to film faithfully.

I didn’t see Mary Poppins myself until I was over forty years of age, so while I do find it a very good movie, it has never held a very dear place in my heart.  I do accept that it does for countless others, though, so If you are one of those folks, then I believe you would enjoy this tale of how one of your favorite stories came to the silver screen. Even if you aren’t one of those people, however, you would indeed be a heartless creature if you didn’t find this lovely story as endearing as the tale of the mysterious nanny with the magical umbrella.

"American Hustle" is a tad too long on the "hustle" part...

I remember ABSCAM.  It is one my earliest memories of the “news,” when I began to realize that there was more to the world than just my home, my immediate family and my school - one that involved people I would never see or meet, yet who would still affect my life.  The FBI sting operation that resulted in the conviction of numerous congressmen and a couple of Senators on corruption charges did not necessarily have such an affect on my own little corner of the world, but it just seemed to come along at a time when I was become aware of the larger world around me.  Thus, when the teaser trailers for director David O. Russell’s follow-up to last year’s Silver Linings Playbook began to hit the web, I found myself growing very eager to see it.

While not a literal account of that minor episode of recent American history, American Hustle very accurately portrays the mindset of the times, in addition to the fashions and music of those days.  Russell brings back the principal actors from both Silver Linings Playbook (Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert DeNiro) and his previous film, The Fighter (Christian Bale and Amy Adams) as well, and once again, Russell provides these winners of oh-so-many acting awards with material that allows them to strut their stuff in world-class fashion.  If nothing else, American Hustle is a glowing example of Tour-de-Force film acting, and worth seeing on that basis, despite a few hiccups.

The story here begins with Bale portraying a New York con man who is perhaps a step or two above small-time, and Amy Adams as a smoking-hot drifter/hustler (“smoking-hot” being a phrase I don’t believe could be applied to any character she has portrayed before) whom Bale’s character meets at a party and instantly becomes smitten with, despite his being married to a bizarrely-ditzy younger wife (Jennifer Lawrence).  The Bale and Adams characters begin both an affair and a business partnership, grifting money from folks seeking loans after other, more reputable lenders have refused them.  They are eventually nabbed, however, by a low-life FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) who under threat of jail, extorts them into aiding him with a sting operation he’s running on the mayor of Camden, New Jersey (Jeremy Renner).

David O. Russell is well-known for allowing his actors to improvise as much as possible, and this method served him very well here.  The dialogue scenes certainly had a feeling of improvisation, with an energy that seemed to result from the actors not being exactly sure what was coming next, much like their characters would’ve experienced.  I suspect Jennifer Lawrence more so than the other lead actors took the liberty Russell granted the actors and ran with it, as she created an absolutely nucking futs (yes, you read that right) caricature of the Real Jersey Housewives-type as might would’ve been found thirty-five years ago.

While I enjoyed American Hustle, I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that Russell never completely decided whether to make a “heist” picture or an actual character study, so he tried to have it both ways.  The movie goes on for stretches where it seems to be building up to a “heist-picture” moment, only to jump back over to character study-mode, then give us a climax with a setup that reeks of some elaborate con-man scenario, like something out of either incarnation of The Italian Job, but doesn’t really turn out that way.

Perhaps he was trying to inject some comedy into the mix, as Jennifer Lawrence so ably provides.  Bradley Cooper’s character, for example, as well-played as it was by Cooper, is portrayed as a loud-mouthed, self-centered glory hound who is such a loser that he still lives with his mother.  Even comedian Louis C.K. surprisingly turns up as the Cooper character’s boss, and does a fine job of it.  However, Bale’s and Adams’ characters certainly don’t exhibit any satirical characteristics (well, maybe Bale’s hideous comb-over is supposed to fulfill that obligation), and since I seem to recall that all FBI agents must have law degrees, just how much of a loser could Cooper’s character possibly be?  I totally get that it’s possible to have black-comedy elements in any story, but those moments in this movie just seemed to stick out a little more than they should. 

Of course, the actual events of the ABSCAM scandal did not play out in the news the way they are portrayed here, and the first words that appear on the screen at the beginning of the movie inform us that history only provides the seed Russell used to grow this story from his own imagination, so the historical inaccuracies don’t bother me.  What did bother me, albeit slightly, was what seemed to be the inconsistent tone of the movie.  With that being said, it didn’t bother me enough to keep me from liking it.  I suppose it’s a testament to the excellent performances given by all of the lead actors that I recommend this movie, if for no other reason than to see some of the best film actors of our generation doing some fantastic work.