World War Z

Directed by Marc Forster.

2013. Rated PG-13, 116 minutes.

Cast:

Brad Pitt

Mireille Enos

Fana Mokoena

Daniella Kertesz

James Badge Dale

David Morse

Matthew Fox

Ludi Boeken

Peter Capaldi

Abigail Hargrove

Sterling Jerins

We're told Gerry (Pitt) used to do "dangerous work" for the United Nations. These days he is a stay-at-home dad in Philadelphia. Nothing makes him happier than cooking pancakes for his wife Karin (Enos) and their two daughters. Television news reports tell us that a strange virus has broken out in a number of cities around the globe. Well, you know how it is sometimes. The TV is just background noise to whatever is going on in our lives. However, Gerry should have been paying closer attention. While moving the family about on their daily travels, we all find out this virus has come to the City of Brotherly Love in a major way. The biggest problem with this virus is that it can almost instantly transform a person into a ravenous, mindless creature out to feed on the rest of us. It seems you contract the disease after being bitten by one of the infected. So yeah, Z is for zombies in case you somehow didn't get that.

What ensues is a string of chase scenes punctuated by moments of game-planning. In this case, simplicity is sublime. It generates excitement and tension that lasts throughout. The next wave of sprinting, body-locking zombies is never far off. The tension comes from our heroes running from and/or sneaking around them. Hoping that the good guys aren't heard, seen, smelled, touched, or worse, tasted, is a nerve racking experience. This is especially true when Gerry and company find themselves in a spot where the best solutions have significant risks involved. True, the narrow escape is the oldest trick in the action flick book, but this movie performs it with expert level sleight of hand. For its main distraction, it uses the maximum amount of carnage and mayhem that can be shoe-horned into each PG-13 frame.

Simplicity not only works for the action, it works for the story, too. Sure, it's predictable right from the jump. even the dimmest bulbs can feel illuminated when they figure things out pretty easily. Keeping the viewer intellectually alert is not this movie's aim. The job of the plot is to provide a link between chases without complicating things. In other words, it merely has to stay out of the way. Normally, I would slam a movie for such a lack of ambition. In this case, it works marvelously. Our focus on whether or not our heroes will survive the next scene carries the day.

World War Z is a popcorn flick through and through. And a damn good one. It quickly draws us to the edge of our seats and keeps us there. Visually, it's often stunning in its depiction of the zombies climbing over and interlocking with one another to climb things and/or launch themselves just to get at the nearest human. Brad Pitt gives us a "good enough" performance. This isn't Moneyball or Benjamin Button where he has to emotionally carry the film. He merely has to be cool, like we imagine he always is, zombies be damned. He is. That said, I'll admit that I've not read the novel the movie is based on. I don't know where it cuts corners or added things that weren't there. I have no idea if it remains true to the spirit of the book in any, way, shape, or form. I only know that this is thoroughly fun movie.

MY SCORE: 7.5/10

Speed Racer

Alex Cross

Directed by Rob Cohen.

2012. Rated PG-13, 101 minutes.

Cast:

Tyler Perry

Edward Burns

Matthew Fox

Jean Reno

Carmen Ejogo

Rachel Nichols

Cicely Tyson

John C. McGinley

Werner Daehn

Bonnie Bentley

Giancarlo Esposito

Alex Cross is the lead character in a series of novels written by James Patterson. He was previously brought to the big screen in 1999's Kiss the Girls and 2001’s Along Came a Spider with Morgan Freeman playing the role. Here, the honors belong to Tyler Perry. Our reintroduction to the detective/psychologist starts with him finding out that his wife (Ejogo) is pregnant with their third child. Actually, it starts with a perp chase that’s totally irrelevant to the plot except for being an easy way to introduce us to Alex’s team, but that’s neither here nor there. By the way, the team consists of Alex, his partner and best friend since forever Thomas (Burns) and fairly new to the crew Monica (Nichols). After getting the news about his family’s expansion Alex and company gets called in on a case where a very wealthy young lady and all her bodyguards were found murdered at her home. Getting his Sherlock on, our hero intuits that it was only guy responsible, he tortured the rich chick just for fun, was drawing a picture of her as she was dying, despite not actually being able to see any real evidence of this, and that she was not the main target. The drawing leads his team to dub the bad guy Picasso (they do eventually find a drawing). Trying to catch the artist ensues while he kills more women.

By now, you should see my main problem with this movie. No, it’s not the star. More on him, later. I get that Alex is a genius with immense powers of deductive reasoning. However, to figure out a lot of things in this movie he’s more psychic than psychologist. Take the drawing, for example. Granted, I’m certainly not a crime scene investigator. However, from the information before him I’m not seeing how Alex just decides this guy was drawing a picture of his victim. A few moments later, voila! Thomas finds a picture. A short while later, he’s folding the drawing in precisely the right manner to uncover a clue left by Picasso.

This gift for precise premonition isn’t limited to our hero, either. The bad guy seems able to quickly know things he really shouldn’t. In particular, he magically knows where Alex is going to be in one scene and where another cop lives in the next. It feels lazy, as if the writers just relied on the fact that similar things happen in movies all the time so we probably won’t question it.

Things eventually cycle back in Alex’s favor. This is where we get our most egregious misuse of our hero’s ability. The movie’s entire runtime is spent on the cat and mouse between Alex and Picasso, which is fine, but never clearly establishes reason and motive for the events. Instead, after what we think is the finale, Alex just suddenly knows a lot more information and we have a bit more movie to watch.

In the lead role, Tyler Perry was just fine. He won’t make anyone forget anything Morgan Freeman ever did, but he performs admirably. In roles that require him to show his own face he’s usually bland, hardly engaging. Here, those qualities work for him because it gives the analytical Cross the proper distance from most of the atrocities being committed. It is my understanding that Idris Elba was originally signed to play this role. I think Elba is the better actor, but plays even his non-action roles with too much brawn for this character. Perry’s a better fit and did a good job.

The rest of the cast also does well. Matthew Fox as our bad guy is particularly good. He gives us a solid psychopath. Filling out the rest of the roster are a bunch of folks capable of great work, but given very little to do: Jean Reno, Rachel Nichols, Giancarlo Esposito, Carmen Ejogo, and possibly John C. McGinley. Director Rob Cohen has assembled a nice group but made little use of them with a paint-by-numbers screenplay filled with easy answers.