Film Reviews

RV In RV, the downwardly spiraling career trajectories of Robin Williams and director Barry Sonnenfeld intertwine like the ropes of a tangled parachute, and all the helpless viewer can do is look on aghast as the whole abortive fiasco plummets toward Earth. RV sits on an invisible line that joins no-less-excremental family movies like National Lampoon’s Vacation and Cheaper by the Dozen 2, and it outstrips them all in terms of its laughless gags, its listless cast and a color-by-numbers plot so insultingly predictable that unborn babies could run it down for you from inside the womb. Williams — who, like Steve Martin, his doppelganger in selling out and cashing in, has a face that, no matter how desperately he grins and grimaces, remains as mobile and expressive as a cauliflower — plays corporate adman Bob Munro. Forced to abandon his Hawaiian vacation to make a big sales pitch in Boulder, Colorado, Bob hopes that a road trip in the gigantically tacky, eponymous highway behemoth will force his dysfunctional family to love each other once again. Cue a series of mishaps involving raccoons, slack-jawed hillbillies, and backed-up sewage outlets emitting great fountains of human shit, all of which fail to rouse even the flicker of a smile. Sonnenfeld’s wanton wasting of Cheryl Hines as Bob’s wife, and of Jeff Daniels and Kristen Chenoweth as over-friendly, God-fearing, homeschooling red-state caricatures, are just two more reasons never to trust him with your entertainment dollars again. (Citywide) (John Patterson)

THE SENTINEL The director Clark Johnson got his start in TV, and it shows. Two years ago, he turned that cop-drama warhorse S.W.A.T. into a surprise (read: inexplicable) summer hit; now he’s back with an enervated presidential-assassination thriller that feels calculated to cash in on the popularity of 24. In reality, it’s closer to a tawdry White House soap opera, with Michael Douglas as the veteran Secret Service agent whose affair with the first lady (Kim Basinger) gets him blackmailed by the ex-KGB operatives who, for reasons unspecified, want to off the current Prez (Sledge Hammer himself, David Rasche). Framed for complicity in the assassination plot, Douglas flees while his dogged protégé (Keifer Sutherland, as a slightly neutered Jack Bauer) gives chase and Johnson — as he did for the cops of S.W.A.T. — takes every opportunity to show us how much cooler and sexier Secret Service agents are than we mere mortals. (Cue Desperate Housewives’ Eva Longoria, in a cleavage-intensive getup as Sutherland’s partner.) With its roving camera, rapid-fire cuts and amped-up sound design (okay, we get it: a camera shutter can sound an awful lot like a gun cocking), The Sentinel works overtime to suggest what a thrill-a-minute world its characters inhabit; but only during the last 20 minutes does the movie’s pulse, or ours, rise above a flatline. The actors look uniformly unhappy to be there — except for Basinger, who seems lost in a lithium haze. That said, there’s almost nothing wrong with the movie that a few commercial breaks and the ability to do your dishes at the same time wouldn’t improve. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)

SILENT HILL This big-screen version of the popular video game opens with Rose (Radha Mitchell) running scantily clad through a forest (nipples poking through her wife-beater) in pursuit of her sleepwalking young daughter, Sharon, who yells “Silent Hill” when Mommy finally catches her. To solve this recurring phenomenon, Rose bundles Sharon up in the dead of night and sets off for Silent Hill, a place that mysteriously no longer appears on maps, but which happens to be located near the adopted Sharon’s birthplace. An accident occurs, Sharon vanishes, and Rose sets about finding her daughter in the not-quite-deserted town, where ash falls from the sky and every setting looks like a back lot or a sound stage. Before you can say “Holy attack of bad CGI,” Rose is running (and running) through abandoned streets and haunted buildings, fleeing assorted mutants, bugs and blade-wielding demons while screaming for her child. Buried beneath Silent Hill’s hyperstylized stupidity (the film looks like a collaboration between David Fincher, Trent Reznor and music-video director Mark Romanek) is the hollow effort to bottle something of the Zeitgeist unease surrounding religious fundamentalism. Late in the film, after we’ve been bombarded with religious symbolism, Bible quotes that appear everywhere from billboards to restroom archways, and extras seemingly culled from The Scarlet Letter, one character shouts at another, “Your faith brings death!” By which point, that sliver of a premise has already been wasted. (Citywide) (Ernest Hardy)

STICK IT was not screened in advance of our publication deadline, but a review will appear here next week and can be found at www.laweekly.com/film. (Citywide)