Little Children

Written around the time of the film's release. Field's most recent film—after an extended hiatus—was Tár, which received lots and lots of attention.

Little Children (Todd Field, 2006) One I've been wanting to see but avoiding. Again, bad decision. 

 

Todd Field has the spirit of Kubrick in him. Field, as an actor, worked on Eyes Wide Shut and Kubrick subjected him to "the drill" about his first film, In the Bedroom—"Why do you want to make that? What can you bring to it? How can you tell your story more compellingly? Is it worth doing, though?" 

 

But Field is a far looser director, and with a much more sure sense of humor, though that was missing in Bedroom. That razor-like humor helps in this story of a neighborhood not coping well with a convicted sex offender in their midst (he's a flasher). Everyone in the Boston suburb is on the critical edge of everyday panic and with an aversion to complacency combined with a complacent lethargy—sure, everyone is a hypocrite about something—so everyone seems determined to see how far they can push the envelope before things come crashing around their ears. 

But the film focuses on a quartet in the neighborhood: retired cop Larry (Noah Emmerich) is a retired cop on disability, who misses the job and finds some solace in harrassing the sex offender Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), who wants to live a normal life—like his Mother (Phyllis Somerville) whom he lives with wants for him—but his past is a constant deterrence.

Larry is friends with Brad (Patrick Wilson), who is studying for the Massachusetts bar (at least he should be), but has chosen to be a househusband and raise his son Aaron (Ty Simpkins) while his wife Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) is consumed with her PBS documentary career.

Brad spends many a lazy afternoon taking Aaron to the park, giving the gaggle of stay-at-home Moms there a chance to observe appreciatively and speculate about him. One of those gaggle is Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), who was working on her doctorate, but gave up on it when she married her now-estranged husband. All of this talk of Brad makes Sarah curious, and—as her husband is more interested in internet porn than her—they gradually "it's-only-platonic" themselves into having an affair. An affair that ultimately leads them to want to leave their respective spouses and run away together.

Every film is a bit of a "bubble-world," limited in scope to the characters featured prominently in the story. And it's the chief complaint by people who don't like particular films that they depend too much on the limited cast-members to sell the coincidences that make up a story. Little Children is one of those films. Pull out any of the plot-threads and it'll tumble like a Jenga tower.

But, that argument is so much blinkerdly cherry-picking. One of my favorite episodes of the podcast "This American Life" the author Lisa See tells of the Chinese proverb "No coincidence, no story" and the entire show curates stories from listeners with the most amazing coincidences. One is hard-pressed to think of a film...or a book where the confluence of incidences didn't create some narrative thrust. No coincidence, No story...even if it's only that these people are locked under some circumstance...if only by coincidence. 

So it is with Little Children. There is an air of clinical observation to the film that is cruel and humorous, though, for the characters portrayed, everything is of deadly earnest and has complex consequences. And its use of Will Lyman (the voice of "Frontline" as well as "Last Week Tonight") as narrator is brilliant. 

Uniformly the cast is excellent with Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson (he had the least showy role in HBO's "Angels in America" as the closeted conservative), Jennifer Connelly (restrained and never better), and particularly Jackie Earle Haley as the flasher. Absent from movies for years, Haley now has a cadaverous look like he's being consumed from the inside, and his beady-eyed pressurized work keeps you on pins and needles. He and Winslet received the lion's share of accolades at awards-time last year, but the film itself should have received more attention...certainly more than The Departed did. 

 

Todd Field is a guy to watch.

The Reader

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Thus Conscience Doth Make Cowards of Us All"

I'm quoting Shakespeare there, so obviously this is a very "serious", and "important" film. But just to raise the hackles of any Weinstein Co. "readers" out there, here's a snarky little blanket quote to start things off:

Take The Summer of '42 and strip all the fun out of it and you have The Reader.

No, really. You've got the moony kid, but instead of 40's Nantucket, move it to early 60's Berlin. Instead of said moony kid having friends who provide the comedy relief, this kid is absolutely friendless, so there is no comedy or relief to be found, and instead of the lovely nubile widow-to-be showing him the ways of the world, you have the dour, nubile former SS-guard showing him just about every position in the book (I counted).

Still, I saw The Reader with a nearly sold-out crowd, possibly because it's nearing the end of its run in theaters, but also because Kate Winslet is nominated for an Oscar for it (and is most likely to win).* Stephen Daldry's previous film was The Hours, and this shares that film's chilly demeanor, and emotional opaqueness. But where The Hours resonated over several story-lines to come to a dramatically satisfying conclusion, The Reader moves along its clear-cut path, as the principles age, but seem not to mature. One would think that wisdom would creep into any of these creatures at some point, but it is not to be found. One is left to sit in frustration while actions are carried out—or more specifically, not carried out—despite some ample history lessons contained therein teaching the folly of such a philosophy. Relationships do not alter, although a lifetime of experience may be contained within the boundaries of them. And finally, the film makes a mockery of the word "responsible."

One comes away impressed by a line of dialogue every once in a while (David Hare wrote the script), the period detail seems right, the performances are "correct" (as they both play different ages of the same character, they seem to have found a perfect actor in David Kross who can match Ralph Fiennes for miserableness), but ultimately it's all for naught. This is a film without lesson, without moral, rightly or wrongly, but insists on trying to instill some shred of sympathy for a person responsible for inhuman behavior, based on their shame of a condition that they have the power to change at any time. What a waste.

* Man, you can get cynical with this, but the part has everything: the character is sympathetic/unsympathetic; has an affliction (illiterate, so no appliance-work, or physical moods to use) and a role that requires a lot of de-glamming make-up, as the character is required to age from 40 to 80. I tell ya, it's got everything to grab the gold...and then there's this YouTube video, that refers to this YouTube video.

All the King's Men (2006)

Written at the time of the film's release. Recent events have compelled an update.

All The King's Men (Steven Zaillian, 2006) The story goes that Robert Rossen, the director of the 1949 version of All the King's Men was not happy with his film. Too long, too talky, and too boring, Rossen was unsure of what to cut to get it down to length. A plan was drawn up: he told his editor to take 30 seconds from the beginnings of scenes and 30 seconds from the end. What was left came in under two hours of running time and moved at a jarring pace, but it won Oscars for its star Broderick Crawford, Best Supporting Actress Mercedes McCambridge...and as Best Picture.

All the King's Men was already a great film, but there were too many compromises to the Hays Code to get it to the screen. Steve Zaillian (a fine screenwriter, who directed a favorite film of mine Searching for Bobby Fischer) decided to make a new film of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winning book, and sadly, wasted the opportunity in a film convinced of its own importance.*

From the crack of thunder that appears before the opening credits, to the thudding James Horner score that telegraphs (with hammers) each imminent plot-point (Horner uses one dirge-like theme which, by its third appearance, I had assigned lyrics "This-is-a-sad-sto-ry/A-bout Lou-i-si-an-na"), to the subdued lighting and the art design in shades of "Godfather" mordant, everything about this movie promises great portent, but merely meanders through its story of how nothing born of corruption can come to any good, be it man, ideals or building materials.

It's a frustrating film to sit through, because the pieces are there given a less respectful (as in funeral-respect) presentation. The cast is impressive. Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Hopkins play the well-to-do Stanton clan. Kathy Baker and Jude Law are the blighted Burden clan, and Sean Penn, looking more and more like a young George C. Scott, plays the fictional surrogate of Huey Long, Willie Stark. As his flaks and flunkies, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson and Jackie Earle Haley.

Good cast. But there are problems. Penn, as he is wont to do, goes over-the-top in his speechifying, his arms waiving wildly in the air, his fingers doing filigreed dances. Where Penn got the inspiration to play it this way is a mystery, as footage of Long in speech-mode (below) shows him much more in control. Not even Adolph Hitler emotes this much. Jude Law, never the strongest of actors, falls into the dreariness of the film, staring at the other actors or nothing-in-particular with sad doe-like eyes.** One suspects editing problems with this film—Zaillian did spend an inordinate amount of time in post-production on it. Subjects are brought up and dropped, like Stark's football-playing son, who figures prominently in the '48 film, is mentioned here and then never heard from again.*** We never do find out how Burden's mother acquires facts to make an accusation against him. Mark Ruffalo's character is left as a dissatisfying enigma.

What we do get is ponderous, and pretentious. Zaillian spends a lot of screen-time trying to show (visually) that the only thing that could unite the "hicks" and gentry of Louisiana is death. Again, that same lesson has been told in better films.

2023 Update: At the time the film came out, there was speculation that it was a "dig" at then-President George W. Bush. If so, it was bound to disappoint both sides, no matter where you came down on that particular president.

But, a re-watch today would make folks blanch—"well, that-tha-that's Donald Trump!"

Nope. Trump just borrowed from the same play-book that politicians have been using since politics became the world's "second oldest profession:" "Get elected by any means necessary. Cease power. Never let it go." That's the genius of Robert Penn Warren's book; he found inherent truths in the process and they continue no matter what generation after reads it. Sure, it seems like Trump—except for the details, the milieu, the accent. But, the autocracy is there. The crowd-whipping. The scandals. Warren could be accused of writing cliches. But, cliches are there because they're unerringly true and happen enough to become cliches.

For the truth is, politicians lie. And people look for a Messiah and want to be lied to. They eat it up. And the ultimate cliche. Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.

Just because it's a cliche doesn't make it not true.

* Given the awards-history of the cast and screenwriter it was assumed that this version of All The King's Men would be a top contender come Oscar-season, but its poor box-office reception scuttled those hopes.

** K (who likes Law) kept yelling out "accent-drop!" whenever his "Lawsiana" draw-el moved to Market Street. Anthony Hopkins, the sly old dog, doesn't even try.

*** Sadly, Zaillian, in an attempt to simplify his film, gutted some crucial scenes from it including the sub-plot about Stark's son, and an extended ending that provides the best scenes for Jude Law and Jackie Earle Haley.

Carnage (2011)

Written at the time of the film's release...

Get a Room!
or
Who's Afraid of Nibbles the Hamster?

A schoolyard brawl between two kids escalates into a meeting between the parents that only proves the kids are amateurs at it in Roman Polanski's new film Carnage, based on the play by Yasmina Reza.  The meet-and-greet takes place at the New York apartment of Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly)— he's in hardware sales and she's an arts afficianado and rights activist, writing a book about African genocide—with Alan and Nancy Cowen (Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet)—he's in lawyerly mode and she frets. It all starts well enough: cobbler is served and coffee offered, everyone's uncomfortable and on their best behavior.  But the niceties don't last any longer than the cobbler. Penelope starts getting self-righteous, Michael, overly conciliatory, while Alan loses his laser-like focus from a series of interrupting cell-calls that from a client with a wonder-drug for high blood pressure that may have all sorts of side effects.

Then, Nancy...well, things go down-hill fast after Nancy...

It's basically a one-joke black-comedy that isn't remotely funny (the anti-punch-line comes at the end) turned up to 11 by an all-star cast and a director confined to a minimal set and probably going a little bit insane day by day. Bear in mind that Polanski was probably giggling and encouraging extremism all through shooting, but all these terrific actors have their moments of masonry mastication—Foster coming off the worst, and Winslet the best, with Reilly and Waltz being alternately obnoxious and snaky. Fairly soon, lines are drawn in tasteful carpets and there's a constant tying and untying of boundaries and bonds, that fall along lines of sex, politics and whatever the last subject talked about was. 

There are histrionics galore, and while there are no real baring of souls, there are all sorts of baring of inhibitions and not in the fun way. These people seem to have absolutely no sense of decorum or restraint or any illusions that their opinions might not be the most pertinent to the proceedings. It's all out there, vomited at projectile force and with no dolby/no squelch. That would appear to be the comedy of it, but unfortunately it comes off a little forced and a little unrealistic. It doesn't matter how set in their ways and high-strung these people are, at some point there is going to be re-assessment and back-pedaling, even if the trajectory is straight down-hill.

Not in this self-contained universe. There is no tentativeness here, no sticking the toes in to test the waters, everybody belly-flops into the pool from the high-minded-board. Even "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is subtle by comparison, although there are some nice behavioral touches, like Penelope raising her level of discussion to an obviously uncomfortable volume to drown out Alan's phone-call.  Common sense is forgotten along with the kids argument and everything degenrates to a tag-team grudge match between and among the couples.

Ultimately, it's a bad night out that you want to forget about in the morning.

Avatar: The Way of Water

It's All About...Family

or 

Fleeing Na'vi Dad
 

I was one of the few inhabitants of this planet that was unimpressed with James Cameron's Avatar—the most popular movie of all time (based on inflated movie receipts, truth be told). I felt it was Cameron at his worst—recycling shop-worn ideas under a veneer of technology and engineering—while also being a fun watch (if you didn't take it too damned seriously).

 

The sequel (first sequel) Avatar: The Way of Water was released at Christmas, and I was in no hurry to see it. I wanted to avoid big crowds, I wasn't "enthused" because I was underwhelmed (while being simultaneously over-stimulated) by the first and expected "more of the same." I also knew that it would be around in theaters for awhile, maybe even held in 3-D (where most movie-chains drop the refinements down to "Standard version" after a week). But, mostly I waited because James Cameron was in no hurry to release it, so why should I be in a hurry to see it. I mean, what's the rush? It wasn't going anywhere.

I did go see it, finally, in XD and 3-D. You might as well go the full yard. And, I found that to be a wise decision, as it brought up many aspects to the film, which I wouldn't even have noticed had I seen it "flat" and "standard." In fact, what is a tad revolutionary in the film and—to me, anyway—makes it worth seeing are the technical aspects of the film, which have achieved a new threshold in presentation of-screen.

 

It's certainly not the story, which can be Cameron's Achilles Heel. Concept, sure. But, what he does with it, not so much. His movies look good on paper, like an architect's sketch, but the blue-prints fleshing it out may reveal some flaws where hard reality conflicts with imagination.

A:TWOW begins with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now permanently on his surrogate-planet, Pandora, living with his mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña, who clearly knows how to eke out a subtle, effective performance from motion capture) and their kids, Notoyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as adopted kids Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the child of Dr. Grace Augustine's avatar, produced by immaculate conception of something, and "Spider" (Jack Champion), the son of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), both of whom died in the original film.

Well, they're baaa-ack. Dr. Grace as a hologramatic image and spiritual Obi-Wan, and Quaritch as a hologramatic image and his own avatar (something, as I recall, that the original Col. Miles was dead-set against...oh, well...blue-prints). Quaritch's avatar is given one of those too-lame-to-be-inspirational Quaritch pep-talks about how he needs to man-up and take down Jake Sully because...well, he has to. Jake beat him last time fair and square, by having his wife shoot him, but...ya know...there was a conspiracy and rigged voting machines and Quaritch has no life but a huge ego and...blue-prints. There IS no reason for him to revenge himself against Sully, even if one doesn't include the fact the original character is dead and his avatar is only vengeful-by-proxy...and he's told to do it.

As specious as all this seems, it's enough to send Jake and family packing to another part of Pandora as refugees and depend on the kindness of the Metkayina tribe who live on Pandora's eastern seaboard and have a society based mostly on water and the denizens therein.* They must fight discrimination from the Metkayina ("they'll take our jobs!" and, more legitimately, "they'll lead the Earthers right to us!"). Along the way, Jake's kids want to sit at the BIG kid's table, and complicate matters. 

Not that there's much to contemplate. Earthers are bad. Pandorans are good. Earthers-gone-Native are good. Sometimes, parents just don't understand. At some point, Belle from The Little Mermaid should show up and do an "I know, right?"

"Jake! This is where we first met!"

 

But, as simple as it is, it's a three hour movie and Cameron fills the spaces with a lot of his Greatest Hits: two equally matched fighters slugging it out in an industrial setting (pick a Terminator, any Terminator), learning how to manage your breathing underwater (The Abyss) and finally, having to get out from under-deck of a sinking boat (Titanic). Things look different in Metkayina—the folks are greenish around their gills—but it doesn't matter where Cameron goes, there he is. It's very familiar.

Except when it's not. Kudos to the design team to make the Metkayina look like a different culture (I think, by now, movie-goers are hep to accepting and even embracing that concept). But, the real eye-opener is how good the CGI (mostly from New Zealand's WETA) has gotten. Performances are sharper and subtle (as I said, Saldana shines at this), and they even manage to make a Sigourney Weaver character look "right"—I remember there were audible grunts of disappointment at the appearance of her avatar in the last one as the CGI looked "uncanny-valleyish."

Look at the subtlety of expression in Saldana's character.

She is clearly giving Sully the "Dad's being a little heavy-handed" look

 

The CGI characters are so good and so realized that when a real-life human being shares the screen with them, they look flat and slightly less real (the human actors do have the disadvantage of being subject to gravity) than their pixelated counterparts. Maybe it's the effects of 3-D capture, or the differences between reflected lighting and computerized grading, but this is particularly true in the character of Spider, who often gets lost in the wash of images and is bound by the limits of movement bound by the laws of physics. Now, that will be an interesting challenge for Cameron and other film-makers in the future.

There are still issues with close objects "fritzing" as they move across the screen, so maybe objects should be less enfolded in the scenery.** Where the 3-D really, really works are in shots of floating screens and in the underwater shots that dominate the second hour of the film. Cameron went to the trouble of filming his motion-captured actors in a studio water-tank swimming about and there's something about the heavy influence of water and the languid way things move in it that feels particularly realistic with CGI rendering and 3-D projection, far more effectively than with the open-air scenes. It's a particularly effect feat of magical image-making that is incredibly credible and remarkable.

Now, if they could apply the same ingenuity to the scripting as they apply to the technology, that would be something. Maybe like losing the Quaritch character and its lunatic revenge story-line, would allow Cameron to concentrate on something worth the effort, both on his and our parts.

 

* Jake never once thinks that his leaving may not deter Quadritch from laying waste to the Omaticaya, anyway. Because he was so subtle and nuanced in his approach LAST time?

** There is a caveat to this: some of the "Ridley-Scott-fluff" that Cameron inserts into the frame doesn't always "work" but his insects were good enough to provoke the kid in the seat in front of me to reach out to try and grab them. That's a good (if amusing) testament.

Contagion

I had planned to put up a review of Soderbergh's The Laundromat today, but this seems a more appropriate choice from his work. 

Written at the time of the film's outbreak. 

"Night of the Coughing Superstars"
or
"Please Wash Your Hands Before Exiting the Theater"

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.  Or even to crowd The Bitch. Because, sooner or later, she's going to look at all that nice smooth asphalt we've laid across her, and send up some crab-grass to seek out the weak spots and crack it.

"How do you like them pot-holes, Ozymandias?"*

Steven Soderbergh's "pandepic" Contagion fits quite well in the movie medical chest that includes such plague-filled films as Panic in the Streets, The Satan Bug, and The Andromeda Strain (one could also mention "The Stand," I Am Legend and the recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes—even, if we're talking Gaia's uprising, such natural disasters as The Happening (2008) and The Birds)—an organized, technologically advanced, scientifically-disciplined infrastructure is helpless against a simple organism that spreads through the sheer inevitability of exponentiality.**  

It also cross-germinates into the "Butterfly Effect" genre (see Babel, 21 Grams, Crash)—you know, where we're all so interconnected that if a butterfly sneezes in China, we'd better cover our mouths in the United States or else we'll keel over into the Stone Age.***  And with so many stars (all very good, actually), it also reminds of one of those Irwin Allen SAG-slaughter disaster movies of the 1970's, that featured tag-lines like: "Who Will Survive?"

Contagion comes a few years after the majority of us could dismiss SARS and H1N1 in the real world with a blithe "where's the pandemic?" (completely dismissing such very real threats as AIDS and the hair-trigger Ebola and Marburg viruses).**** But, it is chilling that with all our research capabilities, we'd still be running behind any new threat, simply because the little suckers can evolve faster in the gut than we can be creationists in the lab. And Scott Z. Burns (who wrote Soderbergh's The Informant! and is updating "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." for him*****) has taken an...er...clinical approach with his screenplay, starting moments after "first contact," following the progress of the disease from China, to the United states, its spread and detection by the Center for Disease Control and their efforts to isolate the cause, and, possibly, find a cure. However fast they go (and it's a process hampered by testing schedules and production runs...and which pharmaceutical companies will profit from it), it's not enough to prevent wide-spread death and a near-collapse of societal structures throughout the world. 

"It's figuring us out faster than we're figuring it out," says one of the techs (Jennifer Ehle) to her boss at CDC (Laurence Fishburne)...and it doesn't have a bureaucracy to work through. The drama is situational, so don't go in expecting ambulance chases and LED countdowns to disaster, but, instead, situations where families are ripped apart, investigators become victims, and desperation becomes just another symptom. It's a procedural with a widely-flung spray pattern.

The cast is amazing...Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet...and just when you think they've run out of actors, up turns John Hawkes, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin, and Bryan Cranston...you half-expect the full cast of Ocean's 13 to show up and cough out cameos. No one dominates, everybody underplays, and the heroics are human and low-key. 

Nicely done, and food for thought, just wash your hands before eating.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a 2:00pm appointment for a flu shot.

Triple 9

Waste Not/Want Not
or 
La Kosher Nostra


Michael Atwood (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has a very good crew that does very bad things. Made up of former Blackwater agents and current Atlanta cops, he plans and executes heists for high-end clients with particular avaricious interests. He is very good at his work, as he gears his work towards the clock and the Atlanta PD's response time, with the goal of getting in and out in 3 to 4 minutes.

He is very good at his work, but lousy at picking his friends. Right now, he's doing jobs for the Russian Mob, hiding in plain sight as a kosher meat distributor in Atlanta, and run by Irina Vlaslov (Kate Winslet), whose husband is being held in a Russian prison. Irina's sister Elena (Gal Gadot) is the mother of Michael's son, Felix (Blake McLennan), and to keep a tight rein on Michael, they keep an even tighter grip on Felix. As Irina says at one point, "Love makes great demands on us all."

At the start of the film, Atwood's gang charges into a bank to rob a safe deposit box of diamonds—Irina's husband needs them to bribe his way out—and they do it with brazen efficiency and cunning forethought. The five man crew walks in with automatic weapons, ski masks over their faces—the metal detectors go off but it doesn't matter, police won't arrive for at least four minutes. Everyone down on the floor, and—this is chilling, Facebook friends—Atwood silently grabs the bank manager and shows him...pictures, pictures of his house, pictures of his family, nothing needs to be said. Detective Jeffrey Allen (Woody Harrelson) puts it succinctly: "The monster has gone digital..." (for the record, catlol's are fine).

Criminals being criminals, one of the group grabs some cash and once they're out of the bank and making their way down the freeway, a marker bomb goes off, tainting the money a sulfurous pink, dousing the crooks, and blinding the driver.  The detective in the van a few cars back monitoring sees it all go south and all he can do is keep the situation from wildly escalating out of control. An armed car-jacking provides another vehicle and an IED attached to a gas can incinerates any evidence in the getaway van. Everybody meets later and licks their wounds, and get bad on the one crook for doing something stupid.

The timing might have been better—they should have thought about doing something stupid before they did the job. Because—as there usually is with heist movies—there's gotta be "one more job" before the pay-day on the first one. The diamonds are useless without the verification files—and guess where they're kept?  At Homeland Security. No way. There's no way that they can break into Homeland Security and get the files they need in 3 to 4 minutes (if everything goes well, and it's certain that the guards won't be cooperative). They need at least ten minutes of uninterrupted work, and the only way they can do that is by a distraction—a really big one, one that will generate a "Calling All Cars" response and focus the attention of the Atlanta PD on one location across town, and it has to be done with minimum collateral. The solution is a "Triple 9"—the police call for "Officer Down—Urgent." To buy the time they need, they need to kill another cop.

Triple 9 is a modern version of the old noir heist movies—like Rififi, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing—about desperate men watching the clock; not only are their "big scores" on a second-by-second schedule, but they're also watching the sand run out in their own personal hourglasses. Usually, the jobs have the doomed inevitability of "the last job," the one they're going to retire on, the one they're building whatever tenuous future they have left with. That they rarely go as planned, and are subject to the vulnerabilities betrayed by their participants in their need, are part and purloined parcel of the sub-genre. Triple 9 is tough, gritty, unsentimental, but the vulnerabilities are just as real and just as harsh in their consequences.

And it moves fast. Director John Hillcoat is on his own time-crunch to get all the characters and relationships in play so they have maximum impact when they pay off—it take a good hour before all the individuals are clearly identifiable and their justifications for their actions made clear—part of that is that quite a few have been culled as expendable as the stakes get higher and the weakest links snap, or merely cut down.

Death is around every corner. Atlanta is a hot-bed of gang activity, which is the main focus of the PD. And while the apprentice criminals are acting up, making a lot of noise, the pros sneak under the radar, unnoticed. They're aided and abetted by some of their own with insider knowledge (hence the 999 idea), their loyalties divided, helping not to solve the crimes they've committed.

And they have the perfect target—Detective Allen has a nephew Chris (Casey Affleck) who has just rotated into the downtown district. He is given the usual rookie treatment of the tenderfoot, but he's no greenhorn, and he's not intimidated by or complacent with any gang member's bull-posturing, an attitude that clearly annoys his partner Marcus Belmont (Anthony Mackie) whose in Atwood's gang up to his neck and decides that Chris is the perfect 999—his uncle's in the force, has sway—that is, until Chris saves his life in a struggle for a weapon with a gang-member. But, loyalty only goes so far—about the length of a coin. Or the trajectory of a bullet.

Production values? The film is shot on location and, let's face it, when you're dealing with urban warfare, you don't do a lot of set-dressing. The tattoo budget must be impressive, though. And it's a good thing for the film-makers the price of gasoline has dropped. Hillcoat is fast and efficient and doesn't waste a lot of frames. More importantly, in this day and age, he doesn't shirk on them, either. And the actors are given latitude to set themselves apart from each other in terms of style and attitude, separating their characters in squads of those who know they're living in a tragedy and those who don't. Chiwetel Ejiofor, in particular, makes the most of the former camp, even as he pushes through it with a fierce defiance. Casey Affleck and Anthony Mackie are two of the best second-tier actors out there, who can make A-listers look flat in comparison, or as if they're working too hard, and their relationship is actually the strongest of any two characters in the film, in good and bad times, just by the looks they throw at each other. As per usual, the women are given short-shrift in this type of film. There's less dimension to Winslet and Gadot, merely because they're scowling as much as the Big Boys, although the casualness with which they do it should be noted—as if Winslet played villains every day.

The one relationship you don't believe is the Affleck-Harrelson nephew-uncle relationship; you don't believe that these two could ever be related to each other, despite Harrelson's mother-bear reactions to his nephew's predicaments. Harrelson's veteran cop is so tainted and Affleck's so effectively unaffected that you wonder how much time they actually spent with each other to have one influence the other. The script speaks of a bond, but if Hillcoat short-changed anything in the film, it's the scenes between Affleck and Harrelson...or the rehearsal time needed to make them a bit more sympatico.

The movie's not for everyone. It's a hard "R" for violence and language (no sex) and for the depiction of human misery that surrounds the events and informs them. Other than that, the story is a late-model LED-illuminated version of the type.

As they say in The Asphalt Jungle, Crime is only a left handed form of human endeavor. But in the age of cell-phones and IED's, check that bracelet to make that left hand doesn't get blown off.