Review: 'When The Game Stands Tall' starring Jim Caviezel, Michael Chiklis, and Laura Dern

When the Game Stands Tall stars Jim Caviezel as Coach Bob Ladouceur who led the De La Salle High School varsity Football team to a 151 record-setting winning streak and what happens as the streak effects his life and those of his family and players. See here’s the thing; most people, me included, are pretty easy to please with a sports movie. Especially a HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL MOVIE! This is America and we love football. Here we have a movie with Caviezel portraying this almost perfect coach in terms of his moral standing and reasoning for coaching these kids. These kids are perfect at least the ones in the beginning of the movie. The seniors that are leaving are great, demigod-like athletes with wholesome attitudes like they all came from Smallville, Kansas. After the first 15 minutes or so just about every bad thing that can happen to the team happens, just as they are beginning to be led by a new group of flawed senior athletes. It’s all serious; old players die, some players lose all their family, and some experience major incapacitating injuries.

It begins to feel like a little too much as major sad events are piled on and a Christian-themed message is forced into the story. They all feel out of place and like the movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. Does it want to be a sports movie or a spiritually uplifting movie? I don’t know if the film makers know themselves. The movie is also totally too long and poorly paced throughout. The movie would’ve been a lot better if they would’ve just focused on the team’s fall from grace and the need for the team to rally together in time for a major game against the country’s best team. What happens is that the story’s true climax happens in the middle of the film.

There are a lot of well-filmed football scenes throughout the movie along with some decent performances. What they are performing doesn’t always make a lot of sense, but what is worse is the team’s triumph doesn’t feel earned at all. It’s a movie where you watch a great high school football program that won 151 times lose a game and then goes right back to winning.  It’s not like watching the underdogs come up and reach the championship or something like We Are Marshall where something completely terrible happens and the whole community comes together to support the players on the field. It’s just like watching Johnny Manziel not get picked first in the draft. Like am I supposed to feel sad? Really?

In the end I’m just surprised that a sports movie could be this lackluster in every way imaginable. Somewhere it’s like a whole lot of people really liked this true story and tried really hard to make a movie out of it. The saddest part is that to me they totally failed at doing it and I think the real people in this story deserve way better.

 Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Read More

Trailer for Football Drama ''When the Game Stands Tall'

As the glitz, glamor, and fat paychecks of the NFL splash onto the big screen with Draft Day (review of that here, by the way), some may prefer to go back to a time when football was simpler. The first trailer for When the Game Stands Tall has been released, telling the inspirational true story of Northern California's De La Salle High School football coach, Bob Ladouceur, played by Jim Caviezel.  Lacouceur had led his team to the longest winning streak in history, spanning 12 years and 151 straight victories, but when they finally suffer a loss, he must deal with the self-doubt and backlash that follows.

Thomas Carter (Coach Carter) directs, with Alexander Ludwig, Laura Dern, and Michael Chiklis co-starring. When the Game Stands Tall takes the field on August 22nd.

Read More

Review: 'Escape Plan' Starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger

If this were twenty years ago, Escape Plan would be pretty awesome. Oh wait, no it wouldn't, because then audiences would be expecting the explosive big guns and bigger pecs action a film starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger should provide. Even at an advanced stage of their careers (and physical shape), they can still open a cinematic can of whoop ass in The Expendables, and individually they've done a pretty good job of reliving their youthful glory days. But Escape Plan, which sees them sharing top billing for the first time ever, is a creaky and nonsensical prison drama that emphasizes their brains over brawn. Who in the world wants to watch that?

Stallone is really the lead guy here as Ray Breslin, a security expert and modern day Houdini whose job is to go undercover in maximum security prisons, then break out to expose their flaws. Yeah, it's all sorts of stupid, and the suggestion that he's some sort of genius is less than convincing.  His mental acumen is thrown further into question when he's approached by a shady CIA liaison who offers $5M for him to break into an off-the-books facility full of the world's worst criminals. Breslin's team, which consists of the lovely Amy Ryan and 50 Cent (as a menacing tech geek!) are skeptical, as anybody with half a brain should be. Vincent D'Oonfrio plays Breslin's twitchy boss, who sees a quick pay day and pushes him to take it. Although it's clearly a dangerous set up, Breslin's ego leads to him taking the job, and it isn't long before he's kidnapped and shipped off to a prison he doesn't recognize. Oops. Probably should have put that intellect to better use, Hoss.

Waking up in a glass cell like something out of Silence of the Lambs, Breslin soon comes to realize that he's actually a prisoner with no easy way out. For a facility that's supposed to be state of the art, boasting more than $1B of impenetrable security, it barely reaches above the level of HBO's Oz. But what's perhaps most hilarious is a suggestion that the facility, a blatant human rights violation if there ever was one, was designed as a back-up because the CIA had ended extraordinary rendition. Oh yeah? That email must be in my spam folder.  This isn't a smart enough movie to really go down that road, nor its thin allusions to our country's reliance on for-profit prisons. There are documentaries for that stuff, guys. Somebody throw a grenade or something.

In his first legit acting role since he pretended to govern California, Schwarzenegger is the only one who seems to notice what a piece of schlock this movie actually is. He plays Emil Rottmeyer, a convict Yoda who agrees to help Breslin mount a prison break. In the process he becomes the target of a dainty/maniacal prison warden played by Jim Caviezel. We know he's crazy because he collects butterflies and carries a handkerchief, sure signs of mental instability.

Directed by Mikael Hafstron, the film has all the energy of a bloated cadaver, and stinks just as bad. There was a time when Hafstrom was a director on the rise, helming the effective hotel thriller 1408, but lately his films have been a total snore. His bland direction hamstrings what should be entertaining exchanges between Stallone and Schwarzenegger, but instead most of their early encounters prove underwhelming. Even during the one time they come to blows, Hafstrom shoots it in such a haphazard way that it's a little too obvious neither man is really there and are probably down the street having lunch. Not even Hafstrom is able to completely nullify the action heroes' easy chemistry, though, and once we start getting them in the same frame later on the film begins to improve somewhat.

Stallone isn't what one would call the most emotive of actors, but he's practically comatose as Breslin, and Hafstrom's constant close-ups on his waxy face doesn't help. Schwarzenegger is better, and it's good to see him not only acting his age, but putting his considerable size (he's still massive) to good use in presenting an air of authority. It would have been interesting to see how the results would have been if the roles were reversed, as they were in the film's earliest stages of development.  Other than Schwarzenegger, the only one having any fun is Caviezel, who years after The Passion of the Christ, gets more religious puns than any actor should be allowed. Either the role was written for him or Bill Maher turned it down.

Logic is repeatedly thrown out the window as the two inmates plot their escape, which doesn't seem any more difficult than what Breslin experienced before. For some reason the warden doesn't seem to wonder why the two biggest troublemakers keep whispering and plotting stuff. Isn't it kinda obvious? And yet the story is needlessly complicated, overstuffed with filler material to pad out a lagging two-hour runtime. Ryan and 50 Cent's characters are pointless, and a subplot involving a mysterious criminal with a bounty on his head seems tacked on. Worse is the unfortunate Sam Neill as a prison doctor suffering from an ethical dilemma, and literally has to look up the Hippocratic Oath as a reminder. By the time Hafstrom remembers who his stars are and begins cranking up the action it's far too late. Any chance we get to see Stallone and Schwarzenegger should be nothing less than memorable, even in a terrible movie, but Escape Plan is an utterly forgettable entry on both actors' resumes.

Read More

Arnold Schwarzenegger's A Terrible Artist In New 'Escape Plan' Clip

Escape Plan stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, two of the greatest action stars of all-time. Even at their advanced age they can still go, and the marketing boys were smart enough to have them brawling in the first official clip released a few days ago. The latest piece of footage wants you to know they can also be funny when called upon, or at least that seems to be the plan.

Stallone stars as security expert Ray Breslin, who is betrayed and tossed into a maximum security prison of his own design. He doesn't appear in this clip, however, instead focusing on Schwarzenegger's inmate character who helps Breslin mount a prison break. Jim Caviezel plays the warden who is none-too-pleased with Schwarzenegger's map drawing skills, or lack thereof.

Escape Plan opens on October 18th and co-stars 50 Cent, Amy Ryan, and Vinnie Jones.

Read More

Jim Caviezel joins Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone in 'The Tomb'

It makes sense that after you've played Jesus in a movie like The Passion of the Christ, it'd all be downhill from there. For Jim Caviezel, his Hollywood career seemed to falter afterwards. Despite some decent movies and performances, like The Final Cut and The Stoning of Soraya M., Caviezel has never again had another hit on the silver screen. He seems to be doing pretty well with his CBS series, Person of Interest, starring that creepy guy from Lost.

After not really appearing in any major films over the last few years, Caviezel looks set to return in a big way as part of The Tomb, the upcoming actioner starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Producer Mark Canton revealed the casting on The Matthew Aaron Show(via AICN), saying that Caviezel will play the warden in the film. Stallone plays Ray Breslin, a top notch security expert who designs impregnable, inescapable prisons. However when he's unjustly thrown in a prison of his own design, it's up to him to figure out a way to best his own expertise. Schwarzenegger plays Church, a complex inmate who works to help the other prisoners maintain their humanity. Canon compared the relationship between Stallone and Schwarzenegger to what we saw between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat. Bold words, my friend.  Mikael Hafstrom(The Rite) will direct.

It's unclear whether Caviezel is a good or bad guy, but aren't all wardens in these movies usually pretty awful? 

Read More