Film Reviews

THE PROTECTOR Just as Arnold Schwarzenegger passed the action-hero torch to The Rock in The Rundown, Muay Thai star Tony Jaa gets the nod here from a similarly qualified veteran making an unbilled cameo. Jaa has the skills for the job, and shows them off in numerous fight scenes; it’s just a shame that the movie he’s in is barely acceptable in any other respect. The plot (if we may even call it that) sees Jaa traveling to Australia in order to bust a Sydney-based Thai crime syndicate whose leader (Jin Xing) kidnaps elephants in order to bedeck their skeletons with jewels and become one with their spirits — or something like that. Edited for the U.S. with atrocious partial dubbing and an incongruous new score by the RZA, the movie might be a waste if not for the four-minute, single-take restaurant fight scene, and the glorious final sequence, which does for breaking bones what Kill Bill: Vol. 1 did for amputations. Best to wait for DVD so you can just skip directly to it. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)

SHERRYBABY Fresh out of the joint with a heroin habit at bay, bottle-blonde Sherry Swanson (Maggie Gyllenhaal) swoops down on the young daughter she left behind, who’s being cared for by Sherry’s brother and his wife. In her hapless efforts to become a reformed mother, Sherry all but swallows the little girl whole and tries to bend an unbending world her way with a poisonous mix of seduction and brutish hostility, leavened with the requisite hint of Good Person beneath. Glistening with Sundance Lab grit (rain-soaked streets, dreary strip malls, etc.), Sherrybaby is by no means a terrible film. Capably written and directed by Laurie Collyer, whose documentary background is clearly in evidence, the movie is enhanced by intelligent acting from Gyllenhaal (who takes to blue-collar like a duck to water), Brad William Henke as her sensible brother and Danny Trejo as a sympathetic fellow former addict. But we know exactly where the action is going from word one, and the movie never shakes free of the 12-step psychology that carries its main character doggedly from good intentions through relapse, more relapse, to the big secret that explains why this confused young woman is as she is, to the inevitable glimmer of hope. Sherry may represent a generation detached from its moorings, but as an individual, she’s no more than the sum of her pathologies. (Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7; Sunset 5) (Ella Taylor)

VAJRA SKY OVER TIBET “When the Iron Bird flies, the dharma will go to the West,” says a 1,500-year-old Tibetan Buddhist prophecy, one that seems to have been amply fulfilled in 1959, when Mao’s Communist forces overwhelmed Tibet, killed a million or so Tibetans, and forced the 14th Dalai Lama into his still-continuing Western exile. In the near half-century since, there has been a deliberate long-term undermining of Tibet’s ancient Buddhist culture — crudely violent in the Great Helmsman’s time, more subtle and insidious since. Deep physical and spiritual scars remain on this tiny, beleaguered nation. Longtime Buddhist filmmaker John Bush took a two-person crew into the country — without official permission, they avoided interviews for fear of reprisals — and filmed, often surreptitiously, the great religious sites as they exist now, after decades of oppression from Beijing. He finds a resilient, welcoming people who continue to practice their religion (now “officially tolerated”) despite the infiltration of Chinese agents into their monasteries, the razing of many sites to facilitate surveillance, and the kidnapping of the family of the 9-year-old Pandau Lama (whose future duty is to choose the next Dalai Lama) and his replacement by a 6-year-old Beijing-backed stooge. Filmed only with direct light and sound, Bush’s stunning camerawork adroitly captures the majestic landscapes and icons of Buddhism: its murals and artworks, monks and nuns. Not incidentally, the film also offers a compact primer in the ways of dharma. A tonic for Buddhists, no doubt, it offers many pleasures to atheists as well. (Westwide Pavilion; One Colorado) (John Patterson)

THE WICKER MAN Gender-combat provocateur Neil LaBute remakes the cult 1973 British film, and it’s something of a muddy, methodical slog, and as overwritten as you’d expect, with plenty of the-past-was-no-accident ploys and character traits (a bee allergy, for instance) that — surprise! — emerge as plot functions. Faithful to his own prejudices, LaBute has reinvented the generalized Celtic pagans of Anthony Shaffer’s original screenplay as a mother-goddess-worshipping matriarchy whose main product is honey, and whose men are all mysteriously mute and subservient. Now, the mainland officer (Nicolas Cage), haunted by a highway wreck and in search of a missing girl, has only the quasi-Amish colony’s irrationally antiquated ways to infuriate him. Given its origins, the film is curiously sexless — curiously, that is, until you realize how LaBute is shaping the material, unleashing his particular brand of savage-sympathetic woman hating. The film boils down to Cage’s hangdog investigator barking at implacable and gorgeously forbidding women and, eventually, punching the shit out of several, as the story’s timer ticks down to a murderous fertility ritual. This wasn’t a horror film the first time around, and LaBute makes sorry feints at effective creepiness, letting the story roam in circles just like Cage. (Citywide) (Michael Atkinson)