Thinking Out Loud

Tag: Benicio Del Toro

  • William Friedkin’s The Hunted is solid but unsatisfying

    William Friedkin’s The Hunted is solid but unsatisfying

    After watching too many sloppily-made thrillers filling up space on Netflix (including Mercury Rising, Double Jeopardy, and Along Came a Spider), it’s a relief the my next choice, The Hunted, is so solidly made. You really can’t expect anything less from William Friedkin.

    So why is it so unsatisfying? First, it doesn’t really capitalize on the potential of an intriguing character: a former special forces agent, trained to become a dehumanized killing machine, who can’t “turn it off”. Pitting such a damaged person against the man who trained him ought to have produced fireworks. Instead of a character study we only get a series of chase sequences.

    Benicio Del Toro‘s trademark blasé mumbling is his whole appeal, but here he just seems to be sleepwalking. At the time, Tommy Lee Jones was on the tail end of his plausibility as an action hero, and The Hunted certainly plays off his signature role in The Fugitive. But his performance conveys his character’s guilt in richer ways than the script does.

    For meaning and emotional oomph, the movie leans pretty heavily on a thuddingly obvious metaphor (a wounded wolf) and a Johnny Cash tune.

  • Things We Lost in the Fire is kind of a drag

    Things We Lost in the Fire is kind of a drag

    Rating: 2 out of 5.

    Susanne Bier’s Things We Lost in the Fire is a melodrama in the vein of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams in almost every way: the story of a nuclear family shattered by a random death, told as a nonlinear narrative, with conspicuously arty cinematography, and costarring Benicio Del Toro.

    Even a single-sentence description of the basic plot conveys how overwrought things get: Audrey (Halle Berry) impulsively takes in her dead husband Brian’s (David Duchovny) heroin-addicted friend Jerry (Del Toro). Audrey’s motivations are semi-consciously selfish; she perhaps thinks that she can retain some connection with her dead husband by indefinitely extending his fruitless effort to help his childhood friend to kick his drug habit.

    Benicio Del Toro and Halle Berry in Things We Lost in the Fire

    But unaware of the adage that one must beware what one asks for, she becomes resentful when her plan unexpectedly succeeds. Jerry does in fact begin to kick drugs, a neighbor takes an implausibly quick shine to him and offers him a job, he teaches one of her kids to swim (a task at which her husband had previously failed), and he responds to her flirtatious advances.

    Inexplicably, the movie ends with the wrong Velvet Underground song; someone chose “Sweet Jane” over “Heroin.” Nor is there anything from the Low album of the same name. If the filmmakers thought these selections were too obvious, then how do you explain everything else in the movie?