The new film shows Carana easily translating her MMA fighting chops to the big screen, and all that scrapping clearly didn’t mar her lovely features. But director Steven Soderbergh can’t leverage Carano’s unique screen presence, nor a cast far too good for such a rote spy caper.

“Haywire” marks Soderbergh’s second consecutive genre outing, and it’s clear he’s ill-suited for pulp. Last year’s “Contagion” couldn’t rouse our senses despite the fictional death of millions. Now, with “Haywire,” the soon-to-retire auteur wastes the debut of an electric lead.

Carano stars as Mallory, a private government contractor who takes assignments nations don’t want to claim as their own. The film’s electric opening finds her squaring off with a fellow agent (Channing Tatum, looking suitably hung over) in a diner and fleeing the scene in a stranger’s sports car.

It’s a grand introduction to Carano, who survives a splash of steaming coffee to the face and keeps on kicking.

We then learn why the diner dustup took place, a not so subtle reminder than too many films today feel the need to use flashbacks to tell their tales. Mallory and Tatum’s character previously teamed up to protect a Chinese dissident, but when Mallory takes a new assignment pairing her with an Irish agent (Michael Fassbender), nothing goes according to plan.

She’s been double crossed, and she isn’t sure if the man responsible is her U.S. liaison (Michael Douglas), her assigning agent (Ewan McGregor) or the slick client (Antonio Banderas) who set up the dissident plot. Or perhaps someone else shares the blame for her betrayal?

“Haywire” can’t make us sweat over the details of the plan, nor do we get to know Mallory beyond her stunning physical tools. She’s a dynamo, no doubt, but every time the film reaches for a character-defining moment, the story withdraws and denies us that simple pleasure.

Carano is no Olivier, or even Lundgren, for that matter. She’s still a bit stiff delivering her lines, but by action star standards she’s no embarrassment. And any quibbles vanish when Mallory starts throwing her fists and feet. She’s a dynamo, and Soderbergh wisely shoots her with a very still camera so we don’t miss a punch. Fellow female action stars like Angelina Jolie rarely look capable of their physical stunts. Not only does Carano bring a fierce physicality to her role – she’s got curves, and muscle – the film’s stunt coordinator makes her use gravity to her advantage.

When Mallory strikes, she’ll use a nearby wall or table to pounce from on high. That’s the kind of brainy action sequences too rarely considered in films today. But we’re forced to wait … and wait … for those visceral actions scenes. Bravo to Soderbergh for attempting to accumulate tension along the way, but it simply doesn’t materialize as planned.

“Haywire” defines fast forward theater. You’ll wish you could zap the slower moments just to get to Carano’s next display of brute force.

Now Soderbergh has constructed a high-profile action picture around Mixed Martial Arts icon Gina Carano, a woman alarmingly skilled in the ways of head-kicking, gut-punching, throat-wringing and related modes of cage-match devastation. Unlike Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, and other movie-land action chicks of the past, Carano demonstrates beyond doubt that if called upon, she actually could put you in the hospital.

“Haywire” is an old-school spy-versus-spy espionage tale. It would be nice if the story (scripted by Lem Dobbs, who previously wrote Soderbergh’s Kafka and The Limey) made a little more sense; at some points you might wish it made any sense at all. Carano plays Mallory Kane, a black-ops specialist in the employ of an international security firm run by her shifty onetime boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor).

When a shadowy figure named Coblenz (Michael Douglas) commissions Mallory’s services in extracting a Chinese journalist from bad-guy captivity in Barcelona, Kenneth dispatches her there with a team that includes the prickly hunk Aaron (Channing Tatum); she’s also told to coordinate with an ambiguous local character named Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas). The operation is a suitably tense undertaking, crowned by a back-alley smackdown in which Mallory, in an explosion of leg-sweeps and gob-smashes, reduces an oppo gunman to twitching insensibility. This is pretty great to watch, let me tell you.

Read the rest of the review at Reason.com

Writer/director Mike Mills’ film, available Nov. 15 on Blu-ray and DVD, tracks the bond between a sad-eyed cartoonist (Ewan McGregor) and a flighty actress (Melanie Laurent). It’s the story nestled in between that makes the difference, a father-son bond complicated by the former’s coming out at the ripe old age of 75.

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Mills tells his story with a blend of movie tricks, from bursts of narration to a Jack Russell terrier whose thoughts are printed on the screen. It’s both raw and frustrating, for as much as the film romance formula demands to be broken, “Beginners” isn’t constructed well enough to fully commit to its atypical storytelling.

McGregor plays Oliver, a 38-year-old artist tending to his dying father Hal (Christopher Pluammer). Dear ol’ Dad has cancer, but that won’t stop him from living the life he kept quiet for decades. The death of his wife released him from hiding his sexuality, and now Dad is a fully out gay man with a young beau (“ER’s” Goran Visnjic) and a coterie of politically active pals.

When Oliver’s father dies, he’s left with the dad’s scruffy dog and piles of unresolved feelings about marriage, romance and commitment. It’s no wonder he can’t maintain a stable relationship.

Romance is the last thing on Oliver’s mind when he meets Anna (Laurent) at a costume party. The two click all the same even though each has unique reasons for struggling with monogamy.

“Beginners” treats time like a muscle that needs to be flexed and warmed up to work properly. One moment Oliver is packing away his late father’s possessions, and the next Oliver is watching him and his lover flirt and fuss over one another like teens.

All the better to give Plummer as much screen time as he needs to make Hal more than just a collection of gay character cliches. Yes, Hal sports the de rigueur neck scarf for the older gay male, but he’s someone who refuses to let a death sentence stop him from living.

Oliver grew up without a romantic role model to fashion his own love life after, and it’s left him unable to bond in a meaningful way. It’s a theme drawn so delicately by Mills, who previously gave us “Thumbsucker,” that it lets us fill in the necessary blanks. Mills is equally adept at displaying the dawn of a romance. Oliver and Anna don’t need a sunny musical montage to fall in love. They do so with glances, soulful kisses and body language. It’s a beautiful portrait of attraction, one rarely seen in film romances.

McGregor can be as inscrutable as he is handsome, and once more he’s left without a fully defined character to play. The actor needs a strong director or bold outline to follow, otherwise his inherent blandness rises to the surface. It’s precisely why “Beginners,” for all its sly charm, only manages to get our attention instead of our hearts.

The Blu-ray extras include feature commentary from Mills and a short “making of” feature breaking down how it all began.

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In the story, Carrey plays officer Steven Russell. Russell joined the police force to locate his birth mother but when he eventually finds her, she quickly rejects him. Soon enough, Russell quits the force and starts a new life with his wife and children. Everything changes once again when Russell is involved in a severe car accident. While recovering, Russell admits that he’s gay and begins a new life as a gay con man because, as he notes, “being gay is really expensive.”

Russell’s ex-wife (Leslie Mann), who is surprised by Russell’s new lifestyle, is portrayed as the typical “Hollywood” Christian. Once she discovers that her ex-husband has become a thief, she asks if his homosexuality has anything to do with his tendency to steal. That isn’t the first or the last time that the movie pokes fun at her religious values.

After getting caught breaking the law, Russell is sent to prison. When a new inmate arrives, Russell talks openly about the sexual acts that inmates must perform to get what they want. Eventually, Russell befriends fellow inmate Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), a naïve young prisoner who is afraid to walk out into the prison yard. Because they live in separate buildings, Russell and Morris write love letters to each other. When Russell moves into Morris’s cell, the two begin a romantic relationship until Russell is transferred to another prison.

After the couple are eventually released from their respective jails, they move in together. Russell starts working at a large corporation. Through some shrewd financial decisions, he finds a way to make millions of dollars in additional profit for his company and decides to steal some of it. As the story continues, Russell returns to being a con man while Morris enjoys the benefits of a luxurious lifestyle.

Carrey does an excellent job in his lead role, especially with the story’s physical comedy. Carrey is wacky, wild, and wonderfully charismatic. He presents Russell as an intelligent and shrewd con artist who can convince people to do whatever he thinks they should.

Unfortunately, Ewan McGregor isn’t given much to do with his supporting role as Russell’s often-neglected boyfriend. Morris is a blatantly one-note character who doesn’t realize how untrustworthy Russell is. Even when Russell blatantly lies, Morris doesn’t ask a lot of questions. He just goes along with it.  When Russell tells Morris that he received a Christmas bonus in the middle of the summer, Morris accepts it as truth, and the same goes for everything else Russell says.

In addition to story’s lame gay jokes, the comedy of I Love You Phillip Morris relies on a sense of meanness. For instance, after they become cellmates, Russell hires someone to beat up a “screamer” who keeps Morris and other prisoners up all night. When Morris finds out about it, he tells Russell how romantic a gesture it was to hire someone to bash another person’s face in. Later on, the film takes aim at the state of Texas and its former Governor, George W. Bush.

Although Jim Carrey is great in the lead role, I Love You Phillip Morris is too mean-spirited and some of its characters are too one-dimensional for this film to be worth anyone’s time. It’s hard to like Phillip Morris.

**Major Spoilers Coming**

Budgeted at $45 million, “The Ghost Writer” is yet another (by my count: 17) multi-million dollar sortie in Leftist Hollywood’s ongoing effort to enable the evil of terrorism by siding against the West. And for this reason, what starts out as the witty, fast-paced and involving story of a young writer (a charming Ewan McGregor) hired to aid former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) to write his memoirs, quickly gets buried under the trappings of a muddled and ultimately, very stupid thriller.

In Polanski’s morally confused world, saving innocent lives with the use of water boarding is an absolute wrong and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision (he’s quite obviously the Brosnan character) to join America in the liberating of 25 million innocent Iraqis can only mean that he’s Bush’s poodle and a stooge for the CIA – a CIA that we’re told is always working against America’s best interest because of their Middle East policies and, yes, support of missile defense.

This is the cinematic equivalent of the three-bank shot of stupid.  And stupid isn’t thrilling. But stupid can be funny and when the Condi Rice lookalike shows up, it rises to laugh-out-loud funny.

The shame of it all is that thanks to expert pacing and McGregor’s superb performance, “The Ghost Writer” starts out quite promising — as a smart, efficient, fish-out-of-water story that grabs hold of your attention for nearly forty minutes as McGregor’s “Ghost” (we never learn his name) is pulled from an everyday existence and thrust into Lang’s political world set in a large, sterile Oceanside home on the Northeastern coast of the United States.

As the last minute replacement for the previous writer (a close friend of Lang’s who accidentally drowned), McGregor’s under enormous pressure to meet an impossible one month deadline. In Lang’s topsy-turvy existence focus would be difficult under normal circumstances but almost immediately a media siege begins after the World Court announces they’re considering indicting Lang as a war criminal for shipping four terrorists out of the country for a little of the ole’ water boarding.

It’s at this turning point that the narrative begins to takes on two fatal problems. The first is that to those of us who think differently than the left — say, for example, our disagreement over whether or not child rapists belong in jail even when they direct movies – Brosnan’s Lang did nothing wrong. And so you sit there wondering what all the hullaballoo’s about. In the real moral world what’s evil is not doing whatever’s necessary to interrogate those who murder the innocent and giving up your national sovereignty to the unholy World Court.

Sure, there’s a murder, but it quickly becomes an afterthought in all the proselytizing and it’s an unmotivated murder to boot — to cover up Lang’s ties to a CIA agent who in turn’s involved in (you knew this was coming) a Halliburtonish multi-national corporation. The weight given to these silly reveals is laughable. I’m sure in a fever-dream as he’s spooning with Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann would gasp. But the only crime Lang appears to be guilty of is in allowing himself to be influenced by those who think winning the war against Islamo-fascism is a good thing.

The second problem is a narrative structure that’s sequenced in a way that loses track of what the movie wants to be about. Just as the discovery phase of the story appears to begin when McGregor finds an envelope full of clues, all the intrigue goes off-track for a long and ultimately pointless seduction sequence involving Lang’s bitter, lonely, insecure wife (Olivia Williams). As with all the weight given to McGregor’s deadline, in the end this “romantic” subplot has nothing to do with the overall plot which leaves you with an unsatisfied aftertaste.

McGregor’s character also lacks the emotional turning point that helps to make ultimate sense of his actions. In one scene he expresses a complete lack of interest in doing any of the investigative reporting necessary to unravel the truth. But in the next, he literally risks his life doggedly questioning and entering the home of a man he suspects is a murderer. One of the most important and satisfying of thriller moments is the protagonist’s chilling realization of the stakes involved in whatever he’s gotten himself into. That just never happens. Eventually, McGregor’s character loses most of his steam because too much of his time is spent reacting as opposed to making things happen.

After 17 films and a perfect 100% failure rate, you have to wonder if the amoral degenerates who produce this junk aren’t starting to wonder why all their hard work and financial investment always results in a completely forgettable flop. Someone needs to sit them down and explain that if you want your movie to not suck is has to be about something. And if all you’re about is tearing down the good guys, then you’re about absolutely nothing.

No one expects those who have so willingly chose the darkside to understand that nihilism is not a value, but any junior college screenwriting student will tell you it’s no substitute for a theme.

What is even more puzzling to me is why Hollywood liberals would stand behind a pedophile. Maybe they’re afraid to upset the applecart lest other famous deviant directors and producers would not hire them for future projects.

Polanski’s latest film “The Ghost Writer” is having its premier at the Berlin Film Festival and writer Robert Harris would like us to believe that in reference to Polanski legal troubles that, “I never discussed it with him. It was never relevant.” In Mr. Harris’ world the fact that a man has been avoiding justice for thirty years isn’t relevant. In Mr. Harris world the art justifies the means. As long as Polanski keeps grinding out “artistic” films his personal life is of no consequence. Perhaps Mr. Harris is a member of the Leni Riefenstahl Fan Club as well as the Polanski Admiration Society.

The film’s stars Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor have both been busy heaping praise on Polanski as a “maestro” and  for having an “… alchemy with the camera.”  Mr. Brosnan went on to say that in order to work with Mr. Polanski, “You have to know your onions.” I am not really sure what that means but it tells us two things about Mr. Brosnan, he’s not great with metaphors and he may be a little dense.

Brosnan is the poster boy for the term “limousine liberal.” He claims to have become an American citizen during what he terms “the atrocity of the Bush years” to help his family “endure the hypocrisy and stupidity of the man’s power.”  His power is stupid? His power is filled with hypocrisy? How do you figure that?

While Mr. McGregor and Brosnan are entitled to their opinions under what I consider the greatest of our freedoms, the right to be as stupid as you want to be, wouldn’t it be great if just once a Hollywood type would make a stand on principle. Just once it would be nice to hear a respected actor turn down a role in a Polanski film because they didn’t want to be associated with a child rapist. Come to think of it, it would be great if a politician or two would do something based on principle once in awhile too.

It’s too bad for John Wayne Gacy that he didn’t make films instead of doing clown paintings. He could be living in France with the help the Swiss Government and a few Hollywood friends.

Of course, our enemies do the best they can on the killing front as well, and at one point it was widely believed that the Soviets were engaged in training soldiers in psychic warfare. British journalist Jon Ronson stumbled across America’s response to those mental-murder programs and wrote about them extensively in his humorous nonfiction book “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” 

Now, with the help of screenwriter Peter Straughan, who has invented a streamlined story in which to connect the book’s hilarious and almost impossibly wild anecdotes, “Goats” has hit the nation’s movie screens. Fast-moving, funny, and supremely subversive entertainment of a kind that Hollywood rarely takes chances with anymore, it also arrives at a rich historical moment, as President Obama’s own decision on whether to surge or pull troops out of Afghanistan hangs in the imminent balance. 

In the film, Ewan McGregor heads off to the Mideast in the hopes of awakening the boring slumber of his life as reporter Bob Wilton in a small-city daily paper by crossing into Iraq and covering the war there. But all his efforts actually leave him stranded outside the country, until one night when he meets a man named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who claims he was part of an experiment program training for psychiatric warfare years before. 

The goal was to create a group of “warrior monks” called the New Earth Army, which would be able to read an enemy’s thoughts, walk through solid walls and  even kill goats by staring at them. The leader of this improbable mission was Bill Django, a former hippie turned military official who truly wanted to find a less deadly way to engage in battle and who is brought to vividly hilarious life by Jeff Bridges in a role akin to his lovably shaggy stoner in “The Big Lebowski.” 

Wilton and Cassady eventually discover that Django is being held, along with other former psychic soldiers, in a secret training camp run by renegade fellow psychic Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey). Wilton must ultimately figure out how to get out from between Django’s forces of oddball goodness and Hooper’s nefarious intentions. The result keeps the dialogue snappy and the twists coming fast, as Clooney’s producing partner Grant Heslov proves to be a steadily creative hand at the wheel of the film. 

The result is a film that enlightens as well as entertains, giving viewers a look at one of the strangest movements in American military history while making sure they have plenty to laugh about along the way. All the performances are expertly shaded at just the right level to avoid becoming over-the-top farce, and things move along at an exciting clip. 

Take a look at the track record of Clooney and Bridges, and it’ll be easy to surmise that the film takes a left-leaning slant on the events at hand. But enter with an open mind , people of all political persuasions will have a rowdy night at the movies while having plenty to talk about afterwards.

With so many tales of military heroism left to tell, Clooney and Company choose this…

“But “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is inspired by a “true” story,” they’ll say…

But why is it always these kinds of “true” stories that get picked?

UPDATE: A message to you “C’mon lighten uppers”:

Want to know when I’ll stop being a wet blanket about these “‘c’mon, lighten up, it’s just a” comedies? When for every 5 of these where I’m told “Relax it’s just a movie,” there’s ONE that treats these incredible men and women with the respect and reverence they deserve.

One of five, 20 measly percent, that’s all I’m asking for.

Then I’ll lighten up.

In the meantime, Hollywood can go to hell.

The Pope is dead and to elect the new Holy Father, the ancient ritual of the Conclave is set to begin when the four Cardinals most likely to be chosen, the preferiti, are kidnapped. An ancient brotherhood known as the Illuminati takes responsibility. They have no demands and only wish to teach the Church a lesson for a violent purging of their scientific “free thinkers” hundreds of years ago and to do that they have promised to violently kill one Cardinal an hour, each in a different location, with the grand finale being the complete destruction of Vatican City with an anti-matter bomb stolen in the film’s opening scene.

The only clues offered that might save the day are also meant to further the Illuminati’s pro-science stance. Each clue is based on the four altars of science: earth, air, wind, and fire and to help unravel these symbols, Harvard Professor Robert Langdon is called in. Joining him is Vittorio Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), the gorgeous Italian scientist who helped create the anti-matter and the best hope to disarm it.

Before the story even has a chance to get going, “Angels & Demons” seals its fate as an episodic snoozer. For the first forty minutes, using awkward asides and clumsy exposition, the Langdon character uses every opportunity (and creates a few of his own) to chastise the Catholic Church for its historical secrecy, hatred of modern art, book burning, anti-science posture and a violent past borne of intolerance and fear of truth. Now, I’m no historian, so all of this might carry some credibility (or not), but I also understand that another word for Leftist Kryptonite is “context” and that never once is the overwhelming good the church does given a hearing (other than a single sentence tossed off by an unsympathetic character). The result of this relentless demonizing is to completely undermine the story’s tension and suspense. In other words: Why should we care whether or not this horrible institution survives? This may be the first mainstream Hollywood thriller where our protagonist isn’t racing to save something worth saving.

Make no mistake, the filmmakers here are smart professionals who have been around a while and who fully understand that in order to tell a compelling story the audience must be emotionally invested in the outcome. Unfortunately, with their relentless stream of (at best) out-of-context Catholic bigotry, they’ve made the conscious choice to undermine our sympathizing with the very institution in danger, and this is done at the expense of telling what could have been a much stronger story. You might as well make a film with someone in a race against time to save Charles Manson.

To qualify “Angels & Demons” as a movie would be naïve in the extreme. What we have here is a big, clumsy cannonball in the culture war launched, not by filmmakers, but by ideological warriors who know how to use film.

But even if Howard and company had wanted to tell the best story they could, A&D would still have its problems. Having one Cardinal executed each hour in the grisliest of fashions with the promise of a big boom to top it all off may sound like the perfect way to structure a thriller, but Harvard Symbologists are a long way from Indiana Jones.

Hanks must have been bored stiff.  Langdon is all about the wash – rinse — repeat, but it goes like this: Puzzle to solve — furrow brow — light comes to eyes — point somewhere with authority – speak in academic tongues – dash off screen-left – jump in car – drive through ridiculously busy streets but still arrive barely in time in a way only Jack Bauer could relate to. But to the hero of “24’s” credit, with only an hour between murders, he’s never stopped to wash up, change clothes, enjoy a refreshing cup of coffee and chat up the help like Langdon does in a truly surreal moment.

As far as the most awkward moments, it’s hard to choose between the awkward stem cell debate between protesters the camera thrusts us into or the awkward shoe-horned shot at the energy industry near the film’s end.  There might have been PETA posters on the Vatican walls but Howard likes his cinematography dark, so it was hard to tell.

Too much of the suspense is as contrived as these political moments trying to disguise themselves as a theme. Langdon’s a College Professor, Vetra’s a scientist, and yet the Vatican police sure do leave them alone in the most dangerous of circumstances an awful lot. But even then you never feel Langdon’s in any real danger. I counted at least three times where the killer could’ve easily offed him and didn’t.

For a PG-13 film, A&D is loaded with a surprising amount of graphic violence and the performances vary. Armin Mueller-Stahl comes off best as a senior Cardinal whose motives remain in doubt until the very end, Ewan McGregor enjoys some good moments until a preposterous climax undoes all his good work, Hanks is Hanks, and the fetching Zurer just doesn’t have a whole lot to do.

Big movie. Big stars. Hard to stay away. I get that. But if you remember that “Angels & Demons” wasn’t conceived with the goal of telling the best story possible, you won’t be as disappointed.