RESCUE DAWN

Directed by Werner Herzog
Written By Werner Herzog
Stars: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn & Jeremy Davies
Duration: 134 Minutes

After his acclaimed 2005 documentary The Grizzly Man, German auteur Werner Herzog turns once more to feature filmmaking, crafting a decidedly tense tale that is a feature adaptation of his own 1997 documentary: Little Dieter needs to fly. It’s the story of Dieter Dengler (Bale), a German–born US Navy pilot who, while on a bombing raid over Laos during the Vietnam War in 1966, is shot down and captured by the Viet Cong. After enduring a variety of punishments, he’s tossed into a Laotian P.O.W camp where he finds a small group of emaciated prisoners who’ve languished there for years. After a time, Dieter befriends the gentle Duane (Zahn) and manages to foster some goodwill with the paranoid Gene (Davies) who feels Dengler’s talk of escape is a threat to the calm they’ve maintained with the shirtless, machine-gun toting guards who seem a hairs breadth away from attacking the prisoners. Remaining dogged to a fault, the survival instinct takes hold in Dengler and he sets about preparing for his escape and his journey through the jungle to freedom.
This well has been drawn from many times by lesser filmmakers but Herzog’s eye for realism and un-formulaic pacing keeps the proceedings taut. The sure handed direction elicits intense performances from the cast; Davies is the embodiment of twitching paranoia and unpredictability as Gene and Zahn, usually cast as the goofy sidekick, is revelatory as the despondent Duane. However it’s the laser-focused intensity of Bale that wholly elevates the film, his skeletal body and palpable desperation serves to create an utterly compelling protagonist for this emotionally wrenching story of the ‘crazy-brave’.

SMOKIN' ACES

Directed By Joe Carnahan
Written By Joe Carnahan
Starring: Jeremy Piven, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Ryan Reynolds, Alicia Keys, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Joel Edgerton, Peter Berg & Martin Henderson

Despite boasting a talented cast, some high octane set pieces and David Fincher-esque stylistics, Joe Carnahan’s follow-up to his excellent cop drama Narc navigates post-Tarantino terrain and loses its direction, emerging a hollow vessel in desperate need of some serious gravitas.

The film opens as Buddy ‘Aces’ Israel, (Piven) a top Vegas magician and entertainer, turns federal witness on some very powerful crime families. Consequently they want him dead. A million dollar bounty is offered and a multitude of idiosyncratic sass-talking killers & bounty hunter’s descend on Buddy’s hotel penthouse. At the same time, their paranoid target back and forth’s with the FBI, (Garcia, Reynolds, Liotta) attempting to negotiate a witness protection deal whilst partying with whores and hoovering his way through mountains of cocaine.
The films first half establishes a stylish crime noir tone verging on screwball farce, which it manages to maintain while introducing a litany of underworld freaks and misfits; however it makes a fatal misstep when it changes gears from a fast and furious lead-fest to sub-Usual Suspects dramatics, causing the needlessly complicated plot to creak under the weight of its own under-developed characters and unjustified drama. The final scenes do rate a mention, if only for the truly spectacular bloodshed and gun play which is about one bear-trap short of a Sam Peckinpah wet-dream. Carnahan’s fan-boy roots in ‘70’s cinema are entirely evident and his virtuoso directing skills are without question but this unfocussed (and at times, pointless) chaos makes Guy Ritchie’s slickly crafted crime fests seem like Kurosawa by comparison.