Movie Reviews: Beautiful Losers, Death Note

GO  DEATH NOTE Feeling disenfranchised by the Japanese legal system’s failure to prosecute heinous criminals, ambitious law student Light (Tatsuya Fujiwara) starts enforcing his own brand of justice after he stumbles upon the Death Note, the ledger of a grim-reaper figure called Ryuk. The book’s power is simple: Whoever’s name you write in its pages dies. But when baddies start expiring from heart attacks with alarming frequency, the police, including Light’s father (Takeshi Kaga), launch a manhunt with the help of a mysterious super-detective known only as L (Kenichi Matsuyama). Adapted from Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s manga, director Shusuke Kaneko’s grungy thriller wastes time waxing philosophical about criminals’ rights before quickly deducing that no one in the theater cares about such thematic undercurrents. From there, Death Note is all twisty cat-and-mouse chess match, as L tries to uncover Light’s identity while Light alters his murder patterns and offs innocents to elude capture. Betraying its comic-book origins, Death Note doesn’t have characters so much as pungent types, and the dialogue fluctuates between pithy nihilism and juvenile stabs at hip, but the combatants’ mano-a-mano gamesmanship has such pulpy inventiveness that your inner fan-boy will most assuredly rejoice. See it now or wait until the inevitably horrible American remake. (ImaginAsian Center) (Tim Grierson)

 
DISASTER MOVIE In the Adam Sandler vehicle Little Nicky, Hitler spends eternity in Hell in a frilly smock getting pineapples shoved up his butt. Compared to anyone watching Disaster Movie, he got off light. Rushed into production with no better drape for its threadbare gags than Cloverfield — unless you count such proud upholders of the Irwin Allen tradition as Juno, Enchanted and High School Musical — this carpet-fouling mongrel of a movie no more deserves release than do anthrax spores. Visually an eyesore, comically a much-lower-seated pain, it’s the same as writer-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s other (fill in the blank) movie parodies, only somehow uglier and lazier. Ugliness and laziness can sometimes work to comedy’s advantage, but not here — not when the level of inspiration is someone answering a Get Smart shoe phone, only to smear his face with dog crap. Yes, there are nods to Hannah Montana and “I’m Fucking Matt Damon”; yes, Crista Flanagan does a spot-on Ellen Page — and yes, you can feel the dead air in the theater as joke after so-called joke falls splat on the pavement. The bastards couldn’t even find the energy to put an exclamation point after the title. Best text message sent from my screening (it wasn’t me, but I certainly sympathized): “I want to die.” (Citywide) (Jim Ridley)

Beautiful Losers

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GO I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND Septuagenarian Czech filmmaker Jirí Menzel’s latest boasts the same darkly sarcastic and lyrically absurdist trademarks that fellow Czech New Wavers Milos Forman and Vera Chytilová were known for in the ’60s. But I Served the King of England is hardly past its prime, and perhaps even timeless. After years in a Czech prison, grizzled everyman Jan (Oldrich Kaiser) is exiled to an abandoned German border town, where he reflects on the charmed naiveté of his youth. Flash back to the ’30s, when Jan is a young, towheaded pip-squeak — now played by a sublimely likable Ivan Barnev — whose fascination with the wealthy sparks pipe dreams of becoming a millionaire. From humble beginnings selling hot dogs and working as hotelier, Jan rises through the ranks over the decade — a climb that parallels his innocent sexual awakening. Then he falls for a Hitler-supporting mädchen (Julia Jentsch), and thus begins his unwitting collaboration with the monsters who overran his country. Though the film may be visually fanciful — as money rains down from the sky, a glowing halo of light shines behind a character’s noggin — any preconceived notion that this is yet another historical epic with some magic realism thrown in must be quashed. Menzel’s whimsy is the means, not the end; do away with the clever style and you’re still left with a rousing picaresque of life’s beautiful-sad ironies. (Royal; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Aaron Hillis)

RED If Death Wish had begun with armed thugs killing Charles Bronson’s dog instead of his wife, and Bronson had spent the rest of the movie merely trying to obtain an apology, it might have looked something like this refreshingly low-key, mostly gore-free horror outing based on a novel by cult author Jack Ketchum and credited to two directors (Norwegian filmmaker Trygve Allister Diesen took over the reins from May auteur Lucky McKee after production problems temporarily closed down the shoot). In a broadly entertaining (if faintly hammy) performance, the barrel-chested Scotsman Brian Cox stars as Avery Ludlow, a courtly country gentleman who just wants to sit by the river and fish in peace — until a trio of nogoodnik rich kids decide it would be fun to rob him at gunpoint and give his mangy old hound a shotgun blast to the head. As Ludlow seeks that perpetual enigma — “justice” — Red traipses over some suitably ambiguous sociological ground concerning wealth, privilege and personal morality, without ever delving too deeply beneath the surface, The movie’s escalating series of tit-for-tat revenge ploys becomes a bit tedious even at 95 minutes, but Cox and a rich (if not always well-served) supporting cast that includes Tom Sizemore, Amanda Plummer, and Robert Englund keep it more than watchable throughout. (Music Hall) (Scott Foundas)