Have you ever watched a movie and wondered “why did I just sit through this?”
Thanks to Stiletto, I have a greater appreciation for good or even “B” movies. Stiletto takes a great ensemble cast, a convoluted script with Shakespearean tragedy elements, mob movie plots, and enough violence, blood, and swearing to overwhelm the best intentioned actor, and churns them in a blender for 99 minutes.
Over the course of three days I watched bits and pieces of this film until I’d seen it all, hoping that it got better. Unfortunately, it really didn’t get better.
Rating:
I will say this though… The main character, Raina, played by Stana Katic, was the most consistent figure in the entire movie. Katic somehow managed to not only create a Russian woman who kills nearly everyone else in the film, but she’s doing it for a reason – vengeance is a great motivator. She has recently been in a number of movies including Quantum of Solace and The Librarian: The curse of the Judas Chalice, as well as co-starring in the upcoming series Castle with Nathan Fillion on ABC (starts March 9, 2009). And if she can be the sole beacon of light in this otherwise horrible movie, I’ll be watching Castle in a couple of weeks.
Beyond that however, the cast reads like a veritable “Who’s Who” of action and crime movies.
Tom Berenger plays crime boss Virgil Vadalos, a man at the end of his career and fighting his lieutenants for control. Berenger has looked better in other movies, including Sniper, Gettysburg, and Training Day, but it may simply have been the role. In the first 3 minutes of the film, his character is gutted — and yet somehow miraculously survives. Blood loss could explain his pallor.
Michael Biehn played Lee, Vadalos’ old right-hand man who has spent some time in Europe to take the heat for some previous crime. Biehn has been in more movies than I can count, including The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss. Somehow his character in this film managed to work a swear word into every other sentence.
William Forsythe plays Alex, Vadalos’ new right-hand man and the cause of all his heartache. Alex has ambition and lacks patience, which starts all the dominoes falling. Forsythe is another actor who has been in a ton of different movies, but I remember him most as “Digger” from the short-lived series John Doe on Fox TV in 2002/2003 (the titular character was played by the up and coming Dominic Purcell, who’s had a great run on Fox in Prison Break for the last few years).
Then there’s Kelly Hu as Detective Hannover, who gets a very unprofessional hole blown in her head near the end… D.B. Sweeney as Danny, who doesn’t survive 5 minutes in the film… Amanda Brooks as Penny, the psycho cockney girl with Lee who has some serious issues… Tom Sizemore as Large Bills…
Suffice it to say that Stiletto has what should have amounted to a great cast.
At its heart, Stiletto is a revenge movie. Raina’s sister comes to America to be protected by Vadalos and is nearly killed and raped by a gang of Skinheads, then thrown in the garbage. Raina is lied to by Alex, who tells her that Vadalos knew and hid the truth from her, when it was Alex who was lying the whole time and involved from the beginning. Throw in a few more gangsters, some dirty cops, and $2 million in missing money, and you have the convoluted mess that is Stiletto.
Was there anything redeeming about the film? For me, the only redeeming feature was Katic’s character. She is the glue that barely holds the whole film together. Without her, I can’t say I would have made it all the way through the movie.
In addition to the movie itself, there are no extras except for a number of previews for other movies from First Look Studios, including Way of War, Retrograde, Contract Killers, and Smoke Jumper.
Avoid this film unless you’re really, really bored. I’m giving this movie 1/2 a star. And that’s just for Katic.
–Fitz
p.s. If you really MUST pick it up, check it out at Amazon:
So as you may (or may not) know, I’m in Ludwigsburg, Germany this week for a conference for work. Having never been out of the country except for Canada and Mexico, I have to say I was enthusiastic to go. An adventure!
Well, not to gripe too much but jet lag is a pain in the butt.
The flights were actually the easiest part of the equation, but my arse was sore from sitting on three different planes and multiple seats in four different airports as I either waited for planes or luggage. So quite literally it was a pain in the butt!
As we landed in Zurich, we passed over a Swiss castle on the ground and that was pretty cool. I can highly recommend Air Swiss so far for intercontinental travel. The flight was only half full, I had plenty of room, the staff was extremely nice, and the food wasn’t bad. I’m going to try and watch Journey to the Center of the Earth on their in-flight entertainment system on the way home if I get a chance on Friday. (That is unless I’m passed out cold!)
The Zurich airport was amazing as well. Stuttgart, not so much. They lost our luggage for about 45 minutes as we waited after passing through customs. Just what you want to do after sitting on a plane – sit in the baggage area…
However… Other than that castle, I haven’t seen much more than the inside of planes, a taxi, and the hotel and conference center. Mind you all of these were nice.
But… my body is really telling me I should be asleep.
It’s 8 hours different from here to home in Colorado. As I type this, it’s nearly 8:00am in Germany. That means it’s midnight at home and I should be in bed sleeping. I had a rough time convincing my body to sleep from 7pm to midnight here last night before wandering the hotel a while, checking e-mail, and then trying to go back to sleep after 3am…
However… That said, my presentation is this afternoon so I should hopefully have a bit more free time tomorrow. I read that there’s a castle not far from the hotel, so I hope to go check it out. There’s also a beautiful cathedral I could see across the street. So I’ll be doing a bit of tourist stuff as time allows.
Hope you are doing well… Sorry for the lack of regular content. If I have time and energy, I’ll be writing up a review of Quantum of Solacelater. But this week is pretty movie free otherwise (bummer).
Each year for the last four or five years, I discovered that though I may not like every single Simpsons’ episode, I simply must watch the annual Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episode around Halloween. This year was no different!
Image from Wikipedia
Treehouse of Horror XIX begins, aptly enough, with a segment lampooning electronic voting and the 2008 Presidential Election. Though both candidates are represented with streamers, posters, and park benches, my favorite part was Grandpa Simpson’s sign stating “I Still Like IKE.”
Homer, in traditional Homer style, goes to vote and can’t fit into a traditional booth, so he has to use the “double-wide.” He finds trouble with the electronic voting machine and when he goes to complain… well, let’s say he meets a bad end. Actually I think he dies in most of this episode’s segments, funny enough…
The second segment was a riff on the success of the Transformers movie from Michael Bay. Even the titles were transforming… “Morf Transers” to “Trans-morfers” to “Snort Farmers” to finally settle on “Untitled Robot Parody.” We all know that any time Bart shops for Lisa (Christmas-gift or otherwise), it typically ends poorly. This is no different. And maybe Michael Bay will have the Transformers play Foosball in the next movie!
When the opening sequence for “How to Get Ahead in Dead-vertising” came on, it made me think of all the cool James Bond movie opening sequences (Quantum of Solace comes out in two weeks!) over the years, but instead it’s a riff on the series Mad Men. Who knew Homer would make a good celebrity assassin!? From Crazy Ethel’s Daycare Center (“Where your child learns to trust strangers”) and the death of Krusty (doesn’t every daycare have a wood chipper in the play area?) to the deaths of George Clooney, Prince, and Neil Armstrong all set to the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” song, I was in stitches. Who knew Heaven had a “Celebrity” wing?
But the coup de grace was the parody of the classic Charlie Brown Halloween special – It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! This section has it all… all the characters, lots of blood, and the classic trombone used as the teacher’s voice. And the moral of the story? You get to choose… Don’t feed the Grand Pumpkin a loaf of pumpkin bread. Or don’t offer Tom the Turkey the chance to carve the turkey at the Thanksgiving feast!
When the dancing began at the school Halloween party, I knew the Charlie Brown parody was complete. Where else would you see the classic Simpsons’ aliens dancing with the rest of the gang?
Once again, Groenig and company has outdone themselves on their Halloween episode. It might not have been as “out there” as some of their previous Treehouse episodes, but Treehouse of Horror XIX is definitely worth catching if you’re a Simpsons’ fan!
I thought I’d try to go through some of the movies in November I’m actually considering attending.
As much as I try to fight it, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa actually looks cute. Bolt really doesn’t interest me, but I have two young girls and a veterinarian for a wife, so we’ll probably see it. (Must fight… the pull… of Disney…!)
Quantum of Solace and Transporter 3 look like a lot of fun. I’ve heard mixed reviews of QoS, but other than the fact that I hate the theme song (duet between Alicia Keys and Jack White called “Another Way to Die” that just sounds like noise to me), I’m still excited to see it.
And Role Models just looks like fun. Early reviews have been positive too. The amount of sarcasm in the trailer alone is enough to entice me to see it sometime this month.
Over my long weekend in AZ, I had a chance to see Max Payne at the theater. This is a movie that captured my imagination a bit through the creative trailers earlier in the year. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the concept of valkyrie in the real world?
Well, it turned out to be not quite what I was expecting.
Rating:
A friend of mine told me I would’ve known that it wasn’t what I was expecting had I played the computer game it’s based on. But Max Payne came out many moons ago and I have to say I’m not much of a first person shooter kind of guy (I tend towards strategy games or RPG-style games these days), so I had no clue what I was getting myself into.
Let’s set the stage a bit here. Max Payne (played by the stoic and less than great actor Mark Wahlberg) is a detective in the NYPD. He’s been stuck managing the unsolved case files in the basement for a long time as he’s tried to track down the people who killed his wife and infant son a few years back. He’s the standard loner cop character who’s driven away nearly everybody who ever cared for him.
There’s two “big reveals” in the movie. And the second one was fine. It made sense. But the first pretty much blew the movie for me.
I was expecting something along the lines of a Constantine-ish cop movie. Sort of a “cop stumbles into some kind of supernatural battle that involved valkyrie” kind of thing.
That wasn’t the idea at all, which I might have known had I played the FPS many moons ago. Oh well.
Words to the wise — if you want to see this movie or think you might want to see it, watch the trailers again. You’ll see 90% of all the cool stuff in the movie and miss the rest.
Beyond that… It was an interesting cast even if the story disappointed. Beyond Marky Mark, we had:
Mila Kunis as kick-butt leather girl Mona Sax (That 70s Show and Forgetting Sarah Marshall)
Nolasco played the crazy Lupino pretty well. Kurylenko was gorgeous as ever. And Donal Logue seems to be playing a lot of cops recently.
I have to say that this was a huge departure for Mila Kunis. Very different than Forgetting Sarah Marshall (which I’ll be reviewing soon). I would’ve been interested in seeing more of Mona Sax’s character and back story.
To make a long story short, it wasn’t a great film for me. Not sure how it made $18 million in its first week, but that should drop off sharply.
I can only give it 1.5 out of 4. Just didn’t do much for me. It wasn’t horrible, but I should have stuck with just watching the trailers.
Finally… A Quantum of Solace has a trailer… It releases November 7, 2008. And it looks magnificent.
With Casino Royale in 2006, I fell back in love with the world of James Bond. It intersected with the world of Jason Bourne for a time, and that gritty realism grabbed me in a way that I hadn’t been grabbed by a Bond film in a very long time.
Daniel Craig‘s Bond is vicious. Hard. Violent. And damn good. This trailer gives us a taste. We’ll have to wait a few months to see if it’s as good as Casino Royale, but I have some hope that’s the case.
I recently had the opportunity to watch Hitman on DVD, as it just came out recently. I knew it was a train wreck from all the horrid reviews that had come out when it was in the theater, but like a rubber necker on the highway passing a horrific accident, I just had to look for myself…
I mean, I like Tim Olyphant, who played the title character (Agent 47), but even he and the smokin’ hot Olga Kurlyenko (she’s also a new Bond girl in the Quantum of Solace coming out later this year) couldn’t save this flick!
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Over the course of three days I watched bits and pieces of this film until I’d seen it all, hoping that it got better. Unfortunately, it really didn’t get better.
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