Point Blank, The Guard

I spent the day in Phoenix today, and decided to see how the one Indie theater in the area (maybe the whole state of Arizona) stacked up. Since it takes some driving to get there, I decide to make it a double feature. And I’ll review them together as well: Point Blank and The Guard.

POINT BLANK

This is a French film, subtitled in English. It’s an action movie, and features lots of beatings and shootings. It is also the story of how far a man will go for his pregnant wife.

The movie starts with a “grabber” scene of a man running down stairs, chased by two others. This ends in a car crash, and the fleeing man is taken to the hospital. When the police realize he’s Hugo Sartet, a wanted felon, they post a guard on him.

Our hero, Samuel Pierret, is a male nurse (well, nurse-in-training) on that ward. His pregnant wife is kidnapped in order to force Samuel to smuggle the patient out of the hospital. Sartet is a loose end that needs cleaning up.

There are lots of complications. For instance the wife has been put on bed rest for the last 6 weeks of her pregnancy, yet she ends up tied to a chair with the bad guys.

Speaking of bad guys, it turns out that there are bad guys and there are Bad Guys. Halfway through the movie you realize you’re rooting for the bad guys. Because now you have seen the really Bad Guys. Anything further would constitute a spoiler.

Samuel undergoes an interesting transformation, from a quiet nurse who is proud of having saved a life at work, to a single-minded creature capable of risking anything to find and save his wife and (unborn) child.

Oh, and apparently the French think Obama is a wimp.

This was quite fun, but nothing really original. Think of it as Taken translated into French. Well done, and they manage to create characters you care about even while the action takes place. I liked it, but I couldn’t really give 3 stars to something we’ve all seen before. If you liked Taken, go see it. If you don’t like reading subtitles, watch Taken again.

My rating: 2.75 stars out of 4

THE GUARD

This movie was made in Ireland, and is in whatever language passes for English in the UK. It stars Brendan Gleeson (“Mad-Eye Moody” to my Potter friends), as Sergeant Gerry Boyle, the local Guard (policeman) for the town of Connemara in County Galway. He’s lazy but smart, managing to get his job done without sacrificing the mid-day pint while playing video games at the pub.

The story starts with Boyle investigating a murder at a local vacation cottage. Before he can get very far with it, he’s called to a meeting with all the other nearby Guards. At the meeting, they are told about a large drug shipment being brought in by boat sometime soon. This shipment has been tracked by the FBI, but they lost sight of the ship. FBI Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) is in-country to try to find where they will try to offload the drugs.

It turns out that one of the smugglers is the dead man in Connemara. Boyle and Everett must work together to find the other 3 smugglers. This task is made harder due to Everett’s by-the-book, no-nonsense manners and Boyle’s constant needling of him.

The needling is really the magic of this film. On their first day together, Everett is laying out a plan to canvas the neighbors near the vacation cottage to find someone who may have seen what happened. Everett notices Boyle is a bit distracted and not really paying attention. “Today’s my day off”, Boyle tells him. “Another 24 hours won’t really make a difference. In Hollywood it does, but in real life it doesn’t make a difference.”

The movie manages to do mix funny, serious, and tragic without a ripple. Boyle starts the film as a bit of a wanker, but the writer allowed you to see what drives him to be flippant and to carpe each diem. You see a man who has done much with his life, but has seen so much of his fellow humans that nothing really surprises him anymore.

One of my favorite character actors is in this, Mark Strong. As usual he delivers a great performance as one of the smugglers. He almost always plays a bad guy, which he does well. But he could do so much more; I hope someone gives him a chance to stretch some day.

The movie start out light and a bit quirky, then follows the story down to serious business while not completely losing the humor.

My rating: 3.5 stars out of 4