MovieBabe Blog

Under discussion:

Wrong Turn  (2003)

Wrong Turn is the Deliverance of Generation Y—a fact that will not please the West Virginia Division of Tourism. The slasher film's setup boasts locals who are short on teeth and long on spite, the sort who mutter "you're the one gon' need take care" to a lost young traveler with his fancy hair rather than pointing him away from the road that leads farther into the woods. Lodging deep in the timber doesn't seem much to brag about, either, what with the only nearby house being a pack rat's dream of junked cars in the yard and filthy accumulations inside, whether it's old food or yellowed dentures or glass jars filled with a vaguely reddish substance. Yes, the inbreds are back, and this time with a cannibalistic bent, preying on a group of dewy-eyed campers and the serious young man who, forced off the highway by a traffic jam, plowed into their truck on a dirt road.

Wrong Turn wastes no time with incidentals such as character development before the killin' starts—if the first two victims even had names, I didn't catch them. The rest of the group—newly engaged Carly (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and Scott (Jeremy Sisto), and smart-and-sexy leaders Chris (Desmond Harrington) and Jessie (Eliza Dushku)—are properly imperiled in order of actorly importance (so we can expect to see the better-than-this Dushku in Wrong Turn 2: Mapquest Reloaded), but that's about all the movie gets right. Though the backwoods freaks are suitably scary-looking, when not grunting or yodeling with homicidal glee they're actually very quiet trappers, and the film's way of letting the fresh meat silently disappear while another character babbles cluelessly doesn't build a whole lot of suspense. If Wrong Turn generally passes up the more obvious scares, that doesn't mean it relies on cleverer ways to make the audience jump. By the time it stumbles toward its slightly more exciting end, the only thing the audience has really learned is that the ol' killer-at-the-window bit just isn't replaceable with "Hey, the mountain men are setting us on fire."

Under discussion:

The Italian Job  (1969)

The Italian Job  (2003)

The Italian Job is not too funny, not too slick, and not too exciting—but it's far from just right. A remake of the 1969 caper starring Michael Caine and Benny Hill, the current Job was apparently more difficult to hire for: Mark Wahlberg and Seth Green only attempt to fill Caine's and Hill's shoes, while Edward Norton sleepwalks through a role he was contractually obligated to take. The result is a by-the-numbers heist flick that's compelling in a flipping-through-cable kind of way, with characters and plot developments not so annoying or stupid as to dissuade you from wanting to find out what happens next.

Wahlberg plays Charlie, the next-in-line leader of a merry band of thieves headed by John (Donald Sutherland), who's promised to mentor him through one last job. Cue premature death: After the boys successfully steal bazillions in gold from a Venice safe and have a kooky discussion about what each is going to do with his share, rascally Steve (Norton) decides that he wants the loot all for himself. He knocks off John and, he believes, the others, including computer geek Lyle (Green), explosives expert Left Ear (Mos Def), and, uh, cool guy Handsome Rob (The Transporter's Jason Statham). The boys, ever so pissed, track Steve down in Los Angeles after a year and enlist the help of John's daughter, Stella (Charlize Theron)—who also happens to be the world's hottest safecracker—to get back the gold.

These are the most emotional criminals you're likely to see, and not in a dark, got-the-devil-inside kind of way: Touchy-feely kudos between John and Charlie (ranging from "You were incredible, just incredible" to "I love you, kid—you did really great") make the first robbery seem like a Thieving Your Way to Better Self-Esteem exercise, and Stella—just like a dame—gets all freaked out after Steve hits on her when she first meets him ("He touched my hand!"). Mild comic relief comes from stock tech nerd Lyle, whose gag is to whine that he's the true inventor of Napster (claiming his college roommate, Shawn Fanning, stole the idea and named it such while Lyle was napping), as well as from cheap flashbacks to when the characters were just wee troublemakers. But besides the climactic Mini Cooper stunt—in which a bit of downtown-L.A. streetlight manipulation leads to lots of cool precision driving through not only jammed roads but also over underground Metro tracks—this is one Job that's really just a grind.

It's all too easy to note the ways in which The Bread, My Sweet goes horribly wrong: A mentally challenged 30-something is milked for maximum gush. The old Italian dad talks like Jar Jar Binks. And, like the setup of a bad joke, big, important-looking letters at the film's intro announce what ought to be its biggest liability: Scott Baio stars.

Playwright Melissa Martin's directorial debut is a My Big Fat Greek Wedding with extra cheese, a story of a hardass corporate exec who bakes biscotti with his brothers in the pre-dawn before making heads roll by day. Dominic (Baio), who owns the bakery where his brothers Eddie (Billy Mott) and Pino (Shuler Hensley) work, has a loving relationship with the elderly Italian couple living upstairs from the shop: sick but spirited Bella (Rosemary Prinz) and the horribly accented Massimo (John Seitz). When Bella is handed a terminal diagnosis, Dominic decides to make her final months happy by asking her independent, globe-trotting daughter, Lucca (Kristin Minter), to marry him. (Proposal: "I don't want to get married. I don't. But you and I, we have to.")

The film is flawed in the ways sentimental stories so often are, including occasionally terrible dialogue (Massimo seems to start every sentence with "Me no...") and forced exposition (Eddie: "You're a good man!" Dominic, below biscotti store: "I'm a better guy when I'm up there"). But the whole of The Bread, My Sweet turns out to be pleasantly watchable, helped in no small part by the midpoint introduction of Lucca, who ratchets up the movie's intelligence quotient with shades-of-gray emotions and thoughts on life that run deeper than "food good, cancer bad." And Baio—man, I'm gonna get mocked—still has his Chachi appeal. (The press notes list his Diagnosis Murder credit, but c'mon.) The actor gives Dominic a down-to-earth sincerity that makes his old-fashioned thoughts on family and food attractive instead of unbelievable, and the slight but noticeable shift in Dominic's demeanor when he's around the higher-minded Lucca adds an unexpected roundness to his character. Both the film's major developments, death and love, are handled with surprising subtlety, drawn with genuine heartache and eroticism even in the most pivotal scenes. Like the bulk of its characters, The Bread, My Sweet may not be sophisticated, but it's still something of a pleasure.