Movie Reviews: Armored, Brothers, Everybody's Fine

EVERYBODY’S FINE Don’t be misled by the cheesy, generic poster for Kirk Jones’ retelling of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Stanno tutti bene, in which a grinning Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore and Kate Beckinsale pose with Robert De Niro for their characters’ family photo in front of a Christmas tree. It’s a marketing department’s feeble feint: The four actors appear onscreen together for only a handful of minutes late in the movie, and it’s no more a Christmas movie than Yentl was. De Niro takes on the role originally played by Marcello Mastroianni: the father who surprise-visits his grown children who couldn’t make it home for a family reunion. But De Niro, whose deadpan is intended to signify emptiness and ache, looks mostly like a somebody doing nothing; Mastroianni’s mustache worked harder than De Niro does here. The visits with his kids are equally inconsequential. So what’s the point of all of this road-tripping to nowhere? That parents’ best intentions often get the better of their children? Sons and daughters keep secrets from their parents? Fathers with blinders on can only pretend to know best? It’s awfully hard to remake Tornatore and Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt at the same time? Robert De Niro’s only good at playing a dad in movies starring Ben Stiller? It’s all so much raging bull. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)

FIFTY DEAD MEN WALKING Canadian writer-director Kari Skogland’s slick, soapy procedural — an unreliable adaptation of former IRA informant Martin McGartland’s best-selling memoir — again proves how easy it is to shamelessly bilk audiences of their empathy with an “inspired by true events” credit. McGartland himself, still in hiding, publicly claimed that the film is “as near to the truth as Earth is to Pluto.” From off the violent streets of Northern Ireland during the late-’80s peak of the Troubles, cocky Belfast hoodlum Martin (Jim Sturgess) is recruited by British Special Branch officer Fergus (Sir Ben Kingsley) to infiltrate the IRA. Unable to tell even his trigger-happy mate (Kevin Zegers) or pregnant girlfriend (Natalie Press) of his thorny situation, Martin is pulled dangerously under the spell of both his new extremist family and his avuncular handler. The private jousting sessions between Sturgess and Kingsley are easily the most compelling moments, though it’s the younger actor’s convincing desperation that pretty much carries the film. The unfitting flashiness and clunky segues between thriller and melodrama kill any real sense of tension, making this a poor man’s Donnie Brasco — that is, if its self-congratulation and failure to contextualize the values on both sides of the ethno-political struggle didn’t already make it the poor man’s Hunger. (Music Hall) (Aaron Hillis)

THE LAST STATION Opening with balalaikas, scurrying agrarians in collarless shirts, and helpful intertitles announcing that Tolstoy was “the most celebrated writer in the world,” The Last Station threatens at first to be Tolstoy for Dummies as interpreted by Monty Python. Soon enough, though, this workmanlike adaptation of Jay Parini’s novel about Tolstoy’s last days, adapted and directed by Michael Hoffman, settles into a lushly scenic television drama, though with dialogue strangely located somewhere in the 1950s. The deal is that old Leo (a suitably grumpy Christopher Plummer) was not nearly as Tolstoyan as his adoring acolytes: Neither veggie nor monk, he was rich as Croesus and a randy old geezer. What’s more, he fought a love-hate war with his bipolar wife, Sonya, and thank God for that, since it allows Helen Mirren, basically playing a cross between Ibsen drama queen Hedda Gabler and the little squirrel from A Doll’s House, to waltz away with the movie. James McAvoy is hopelessly miscast as the naive private secretary who is caught in a war between Sonya, Leo and the savvy image-maker Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) over who will get the copyright to Tolstoy’s work — his family or Mother Russia. The movie is fine, but my heart only stopped for the actual footage at the end, with Tolstoy, encircled by Sonya and entourage, being shown to his deathbed after flying the coop to get a little peace. (The Landmark) (Ella Taylor)

SERIOUS MOONLIGHT Timothy Hutton is duct-taped to the potty, and Meg Ryan is just plain potty in this posthumously produced Adrienne Shelly script directed by first-timer Cheryl Hines (who starred in Shelly’s Waitress in between Curb Your Enthusiasm seasons). Born of the grief-fueled determination of Shelly’s husband, Andy Ostroy, to carry on the legacy of his late wife, who had completed several screenplays by the time of her murder in 2006, Serious Moonlight has a backstory much more intriguingly dramatic than what’s onscreen. When alpha attorney Louise (Ryan) discovers that Ian (Hutton), her husband of 13 years, is about to leave her for 24-year-old receptionist Sara (Kristen Bell), she trusses him up on the toilet of their country house, holding him hostage until he falls in love with her again. Ryan flails and Hutton screams through the powder-room tears and recriminations, performing as if they’re doing dinner theater underwritten by Dr. Phil. The tonally weird black comedy throws in some Funny Games — and creepily echoes the circumstances surrounding Shelly’s murder by a construction worker who broke into her office to rob her — when Justin Long’s local gardener shows up to burglarize the house, roughing up Ian and feeling up Louise. (Sunset 5) (Melissa Anderson)