The Iceman (2013)

I'm not the biggest Michael Shannon fan, but I'm willing to bite the proverbial bullet on this one and admit that he can be pretty darn good, if slightly one-note. I guess when you're playing a remorseless hitman your range might be slightly limited by necessity, but at the very least Shannon was able to make the character of "The Iceman," Richard Kuklinski, come alive to a slightly terrifying degree.

Based on the true story of a mob hitman who was believed to have killed over 100 people, "The Iceman" is a story about a very, very bad man who does very, very bad things without really feeling much about it one way or another. Kuklinski's main deal is that he's a very angry person with little to no control over himself, and tends to solve problems by hurting/killing things. So, when in the late 70's the mob-run porn racket he's working for is shut down, the local mafioso running it (Ray Liotta) decides Kuklinski would make an excellent hitman. He's right about that, and Kuklinski becomes a legendary killer over some 20 years.

I said before that I'm not a huge Michael Shannon fan, and while this hasn't made me a convert or anything I will admit that he's really good in "The Iceman." He's got this great duality going on, where he'll be a stone faced killer one minute, with eyes that look like they're ready to fire lasers out of them, and the next minute he's with his family and that hardness melts away. But there's always those eyes of his that never soften. To paraphrase Robert Shaw, Kuklinski's got dead eyes that don't seem to be living until he shoots you. It's a great performance.

"Is that a gun in your hand or are you just...oh."

Most of the movie is watching Kuklinski brutally kill people with emotionless efficiency, and while it can border on repetitive, it's never so over-the-top as to feel gratuitous. Don't be mistaken, though, the film isn't a highlight reel of gore or anything. In between all of that death is the shocking balancing act that Kuklinski does with his wife and children, who somewhat unbelievably have no idea that he's a mob hitman.

Winona Ryder plays his wife, Barbara, and while it's easy to not like her character simply because she is so dense as to not have any idea what's going on, Ryder is charming and quite believable in the role. She provides a much needed juncture between the two different worlds, and I found her to be charming and I felt really bad for her and her two daughters because we all knew that eventually the jig is going to be up, and Kuklinski is going to be outed as the monster he is.

There's quite a number of celebrity cameos in this, of varying degrees of usefulness and celebrity. David Schwimmer has a decent if slightly hard to buy role as a lowlife mobster, and much like his part in "Band of Brothers" as a drill-sergeant, he actually does a very good job with the exception of being hard to take seriously because he's David freaking Schwimmer. Chris Evans plays a serial killer who gets around in an ice cream truck, which is weird, and James Franco even shows up for about 47 seconds for a single scene in which he has like a dozen lines and then gets shot. But he's James Franco so he got slapped on the DVD cover and has featured billing. Whatever.

Nearly his entire performance is spent cowering. Oh well. Still better than "127 Hours."

A guy who surprised me was Stephen Dorff, whom I didn't even recognize at first since he's rocking a sweet mustache. Like Franco he's got a single scene, but Dorff absolutely tears it up with the short screen time he's given. He's playing Kuklinski's brother who is behind bars for the rape and murder of a young girl, and he begs Richard to help him out and asks for money to hire a better lawyer to hopefully spring him. When Richard refuses, it gets ugly quick, and Dorff is scary intense. In fact it's probably the best acting I've ever seen out of him. I guess I'm just too used to seeing him in Uwe Boll productions to give him much credit.

I know that this isn't a very accurate biography of Richard Kuklinski in many ways. Most of the negativity coming down on it from general consensus concerns the fact that the film skips a lot of important things during his upbringing, and makes him out to be a much nicer guy than he was in real life where his family is concerned. And it's true that the film makes him out to be a caring father who doesn't care for anything else in the world other than his family, when in real life there was literally nothing nice about him at all.

It's like if Mitt Romney and Bruce Campbell merged and then became a cartoon character...

All that being said, "The Iceman" still succeeds as a chilling, rather bleak drama about a professional hitman, even if they're taking liberties with the truth. But hey, that's film, right? That's why it says "Based on a true story." I'm not looking for a documentary with this: I'm looking for a well made film.

Check out the trailer for "The Iceman."

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Iceman" is an entertaining crime drama that manages to be both fascinating and repulsive at the same time. While you see horrible things happening throughout, it's nearly impossible to look away. This is mostly due to Michael Shannon's performance, which by itself is worth the price of admission. The dude's eyes can set you on fire from the other end of the room, I swear. This one is worth a look.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

You know, Fudderwacking was bad, but at least when Johnny Depp Fudderwacked all over our faces in that popped zit of a Tim Burton nightmare "Alice in Wonderland," he wasn't Fudderwacking all over a cinematic masterpiece. Because let's be real here: "Alice in Wonderland" is a cult-following thing. It's got a loyal, Hot Topic going fan-base that loves their Alice with a bloody knife posters, Cheshire Cat tattoos, and clove cigarettes. But as far as importance to film goes, it's not that notable. Honestly it's probably one of Disney's weaker films from that era. With "The Wizard of Oz," however, it's a different story. That's rightly considered one of the best films of all time.

Which makes "Oz the Great and Poweful" even worse than the new "Alice in Wonderland." Oh yeah. It's that bad.

Gaze upon me and despair.

I can't say I expected great things from "OtGaP." Not least among the reasons for that being that it was over 70 years late to the party. But given that I like James Franco and (generally) Sam Raimi, I was hoping for some entertainment at the very least. Most likely stupid entertainment but entertainment none the less. What I got made me feel like I had just wasted my time watching a commercial for CGI.

Oh yeah. It's like I'm back in 1939. That's going to be SEAMLESS playing the films back-to-back.

"OtGaP" follows Oscar Diggs (James Franco), a circus magician from Kansas who finds himself in another world after being sucked into it via tornado. He immediately finds himself involved in a vaguely defined power struggle between three witch sisters, Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz), and Glinda (Michelle Williams), who are painfully naive, obviously evil, and blandly good, respectively. A vague prophecy has foretold that Oscar will lead the land to freedom or something, so in the interest of making money off of it, he agrees to help.

Along the way he meets a talking monkey in a bellhop suit, played by the painfully unfunny Zack Braff, who follows him around the whole time doing his irritating, awkward comic relief, since heaven forbid we don't have one of those. There's also a china doll who is never named and pretty much is useless until the end of the film when she inexplicably runs what has to be nearly 2 miles in under 5 minutes, all while having legs like 5 inches long. I must admit - that's impressive.

"Oh no! It's been 14 seconds and I haven't said something awkward and stammering yet! I'm losing my touch."

It's a standard story of a jerk becoming slightly less of a jerk because he helps the "good guys," not so much because he realizes the error of his ways but because the other side threatens to kill him. And of course since we knew exactly what happens since it's a prequel (you know Oz lives, you know Glinda lives, you know one of the other two sisters is turning into the Wicked Witch of the West and the other into the Wicked Witch of the East), it becomes not only standard but a waste of our time, like we're in grade school being sent back to the third grade after skipping from second grade to forth. We know all this. A talking, unfunny monkey isn't going to make up for the fact that "OtGaP" is completely unnecessary, and feels like it.

Like I said, I normally am a fan of James Franco, but here he's pretty dreadful and more than a bit miscast. Although maybe he would have done better had it not seemed like he had smoked bales of weed throughout the process of filming. Maybe he needed it to see Oz since it's clear that nearly nothing he was looking at was really there, and was put in later via computer. Guess they've got me on that one.

Oh look. She found James Franco's trailer.

On the other hand there's no excuse for the three ladies playing the witches, who were across the board terrible. Mila Kunis is acting like she's straight out of a high school play with all the believability she conveys. Michelle Williams has nothing to work with being the boring one of the group, and boy does she sell that. I suppose Rachel Weisz was the best of them, but she's so over-the-top comic book villainous that it comes off more as parody than actual menace. And how Mila Kunis' character doesn't get the fact that her sister is irrevocably evil is beyond me, and just makes her character that much more unrelatable and irritating.

And when she becomes The Wicked Witch of the West...this is the effect they go for. Yeah. They thought that looked good.

Also not helping matters is that the script has them all having what is essentially the same conversation over and over and over again for nearly two hours:

Oz - "You know I'm not really the Wizard, right?"
A Witch - "We need you to be the Wizard, though."
Oz - "I know, right? But I don't think I am."
A Witch - "You could lie about it and just say you are."
Oz - "I know, right? I should do that."
A Witch - "Okay then. But seriously, are you the Wizard?"
::repeat till credits::

UGH.

And they could have a least done us a small favor and made "OtGaP" actually look like the original film, seeing as it's supposed to be a precede to it. In much the same way that the "Star Wars" prequels made everything shiny and fake-looking and basically nothing like the originals, this film smacks us in the face with the computer generated landscapes and creatures that make me feel like I'm watching "Avatar," because you know, that's a movie that looks JUST like "The Wizard of Oz." And like "Avatar" and unlike the original, here everything looks fake, because for the overwhelming majority, it is. Nothing is practical when it could be done in a computer in this film. They go so far as to even have fake snowflakes, because I guess the technology to freeze water is just beyond the filmmakers.

What part of "Wizard of Oz" screamed $200,000,000 budget? I'd really like to know.

How about this: Make "OtGaP." Nobody asked for it, but go ahead. But do everything the way they did it in 1939. I'm talking actual sets, matte paintings, costumes, and old fashioned camera tricks. No CGI at any point. I don't care about the old argument that "Practical costs more," you cannot tell me that it would be anywhere close to $200,000,000. It'd probably be 20% of that at absolute most. And hell, you've got Sam Raimi, who has proven in the past to be very good at practical effects when he wants to be.

Guess what? People will still see it. It's a sequel to "The Wizard of Oz." And you've spent so little on it that there is no way you won't get your money back. Who cares if people will probably complain about the old-fashioned nature of it? You obviously don't care from the start about quality based on the film I just saw. AND it would actually look like "The Wizard of Oz." What a thought.

Yeah, it's as bad as the trailer made it look.

THE BOTTOM LINE - This is a film without any kind of soul whatsoever - a hollow, vapid exercise in using pretty things to distract you from the fact that nothing of any substance is happening, nobody in the film cares about being there, and nobody involved in the creation of it had any intention of giving us anything other than a tech demo of the capabilities of their computer software. No imagination is to be found. No wonderment. No spirit. No emotion besides bad melodrama and James Franco looking stoned off his ass.