Film Reviews

THE HITCHER What, have we already exhausted the world’s reserves of recyclable 1970s schlock? Apparently not, given the poster in the megaplex lobby for the goddamn The Hills Have Eyes II. But nobody told music-vid whiz Dave Meyers, who sets his way-back machine for dimly remembered 1986 and fetches a beat-for-beat remake of Robert Harmon’s sick, scary cult fave about a cross-country driver who picks up a hitchhiking Terminator on a homicide spree. Sean Bean, stubbly and sinister but no match for Rutger Hauer’s archangel-of-death gravitas, plays the unexplained psycho, who slaughters cops and civilians aplenty as he dares motorists Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton to retire his opposable digits. (If the idea was to create a reactionary fable of unmitigated evil laughing in the face of dithering appeasement, mission accomplished.) Alas, switching the hero from a lone driver to a couple spoils the original’s most intriguing idea: that the mass-murdering jackal may be the driver’s own escaped id. That leaves little to fill 83 expendable minutes, which barely register as a movie even with snazzy KNB gore effects, critic-baiting clips from The Birds, a splattery variation on the ’86 Hitcher’s most notorious scene, and some out-of-place Bruckheimerisms on loan from producer Michael Bay. Meyers lays on the shallow focus with a dusting of the art-directed scuzz that passes for grind-house revivalism nowadays, but to little avail: This Hitcher is all thumbs. (Citywide) (Jim Ridley)

MAFIOSO Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso dates from 1962, but this nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town. The sort of man who admonishes a worker for laboring too fast and shaves while polishing his shoes and talking nonstop, Alberto Sordi’s character is a wildly successful Sicilian transplant living in Milan — complete with a chic Northern wife (Brazilian actress Norma Bengell) and two blond children. Modern times turn feudal once he returns to his home village for a vacation. Wife and kids are swept up in a series of screaming reunions and huge meals. Always voluble, he becomes borderline hysterical, his “Northern” persona disintegrating as he abruptly bursts into song upon his return. Lattuada satirizes Sicily as he acknowledges Northern prejudices, but the light comedy shifts when, out with his family in a boat, Sordi is summoned to the don by an unseen messenger. Mafioso was seemingly the first Italian movie to portray the modern Mafia, and it’s a blueprint for The Godfather in sardonic, compressed, anecdotal form. Given the movie’s virtual dictionary of Mafia euphemisms, it’s hard to believe that Mario Puzo hadn’t seen it when writing his novel. (Royal) (J. Hoberman)

Soldier boy (Cineville)

(First Run Features)

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SALAAM-E-ISHQ: A SALUTE TO LOVE Writer-director Nikhil Advani (Kal Ho Naa Ho) cuts with crisp elegance between six passionate love stories in this master-class, South Asian Extreme version of a tear-streaked Bollywood music drama. The nominal leads, Priyanka Chopra and Salman Khan, are as sleek and sexy as they’ve ever been (which is saying a lot) in the screwball comedy anchor plot about a spoiled Mumbai movie star and the mysterious stranger who is pursuing her. The playfulness of that storyline frees the movie to track some much darker emotions in the various subplots, the most engaging of which feature the deep-welled ‘80s leading man Anil Kapoor (1942: A Love Story) as a catatonically depressed London TV producer contemplating an affair; heartthrob John Abraham (Water) as a devastated husband nursing his wife after an accident; and comedy star Govinda (Coolie No. 1) as a motor-mouth Delhi tax driver whose faith in romance is rewarded by the seemingly magical appearance of the leggy blonde foreign woman of his dreams. With so many chances to burrow under our defenses, Salaam-e-Ishq should be a delirious wallow, but it isn’t quite, although the musical sequences in particular evoke an impressive variety of moods. The celebratory air of a mid-film production number in which the protagonists of all six stories, in as many different locations, sing and dance to the soaring title tune, contrasts sharply with a later interlude in which the affairs all hit a bad patch and the music becomes a wailed prayer: “Oh God, is this love or punishment?” In a Bollywood movie, scenes like these aren’t one-off stunts, as they can be in American movies such as Magnolia. Here they express a deep-rooted sense that all these lovers, and many more besides, are all dancing to the same cosmic tune. (Fallbrook 7; Naz 8; Laguna Hills 3.) (David Chute)

SERAPHIM FALLS You have to love the casting of Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson — two Irishmen — as Civil War vets sprinting across the Western plains, with Neeson the pursuer and Brosnan the pursued. The whole project, filled with familiar faces (Angie Harmon, Anjelica Huston, other “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors) in teensy roles, reeks of old-fashioned Big Studio entertainment — this could have been made sometime between, oh, 1953 and 1978, and danged if you (or your dad) wouldn’t watch it on late-night TV. Directed by a maker of — no surprise — TV procedurals (David von Ancken), Seraphim Falls has decent pep in its step until the final 30 minutes, when it’s finally revealed why Neeson’s bounty hunter is after Brosnan’s surly mountain man. The flashback finale and all that comes after (and keeps on comin’) drags on so long that even the actors look exhausted. Before that, the movie is yet another replay of The Most Dangerous Game, and Brosnan and Neeson are game for it. My wife suggests that Brosnan, who takes a dip in icy white water and treks from frigid mountaintops to arid deserts among his myriad deeds of derring-do, should have been paid a small fortune, since he “gets the shit beat out of him.” Neeson too is a credible hero — or is that villain? See, we’re never sure who’s who till the end, and even then, von Ancken ain’t achin’ to pick sides. (Selected theaters) (Robert Wilonsky)