Creation
Well, now I know why it took Darwin so long to write his seminal work, On the Origin of Species. He couldn't see through the tears of boredom. Darwin's seminal work launched the theory of natural selection, his work on evolution still a subject of raging debates even to this day. You'd never know it by sitting through this strangely lifeless bipic, brought to us by John Amiel, who last gave us the disastrous disaster flick, The Core back in 2003.
The most interesting aspects of Darwin's theory are completely left up in the air. My interest lies in the events that shaped his ideas, but the genius's thought process is nowhere to be found. Instead, the film focuses on Darwin's struggles to write the book after the death of his favored daughter, Anne. We see very little of him doing much of anything, actually, other than some stuffy conversation with various people about his own health. Not what I go to a Darwin flick expecting. There's some lip service paid to his loss of faith, and the conflict that creates with his wife, but it amounts to little. It's a shame, because Paul Bettany puts on a performance that shouldn't be missed, as well as real life wife Jennifer Connelly as his spouse. A subject this big deserves a film of equal stature, and this simply isn't it. 5/10
44 Inch Chest
We're all guys here, right? Probably. We've all had that dream where we kidnap our ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend, beat him within an inch of his life and shove him in a closet, right? No? Anybody? Beuller? 44 Inch Chest takes our dominant male ego and walks all over it with a high heeled boot. Ray Winstone, who coversely to Bettany is having a great couple of weeks, plays a heartbroken bull of a man reduced to a blubbering mess after his wife leaves him for another man. Rather than doing the rational thing like...say, moving on...he does what we only dream of. He gathers his crew of thuggish cronies(led by Tom Wilkinson and Ian McShane), kidnap the guy and plan to kill him. All in order to revive their buddy's shattered ego.
Fans of 2000's sleek Brit gangster flick, Sexy Beast, will no doubt take to the muscular vibe coarsing through every scene. But unlike Beast, this flick dares to do something a little different. Don't expect blazing shoot outs, or baseball bats to the kneecaps. This is purely an examination of male pride, and what happens when true adversity pushes it to the breaking point. This one's a talker, the likes of which would make Quentin Tarantino jealous. The word "fuck" is used 162 times, and more crude variant descriptions for homsexuals than in The L Word and Queer as Folk combined.
The hilarity of the cast's mobster braggadocio carries this film part of the way, but the wheels start spinning out in the final act. Guys might want to put bros before ho's if planning on checking this one out. If there's a single woman on the planet who digs this film I'll eat my gym socks. 6/10
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