Movie Reviews: Living in Emergency, Micmacs, The Painter Sam Francis

PERRIER’S BOUNTY While Hollywood has belatedly cooled on snarky, loud-quiet-loud proto-Tarantino gangster comedies, our English-speaking brethren across the Atlantic remain steadfast, pumping public money into spawns of Sexy Beast and maintaining full employment for slumming stage-trained thespians. By no means the worst of the lot, Gaelic import Perrier’s Bounty might be the most rote, moving dutifully through the stations of the genre without establishing or generating any motivational thrust. Melancholic mess Michael (Cillian Murphy) has just a few hours to repay an unexplained debt to the town heavy, Perrier (Brendan Gleeson), but his efforts at scoring cash only get him into deeper trouble. He goes on the lam with his tweaked, gun-happy pa (Jim Broadbent) but shows more concern for a heartbroken crush (Jodie Whittaker) than he does for the bounty on his head. Hollowed of plausibility, sincere characterization and any sense of real-life danger, what remains is a thin and damned spotty skin of situational humor. For every welcome gag — vindictive tow-truckers keep booting getaway cars — there’s a callous barrage of spit-take punch lines involving bodies hacked, shot and foley-thumped to death. Instead of inspiring discomfort — should we laugh or cringe? — such violence engenders only ambivalence, onscreen and off. Ivan Fitzgibbon’s film is so steadfastly blithe that one yearns for a flicker of pretension, some small sign that there’s a guiding principle or purpose other than to take the piss, tiredly. (Eric Hynes) (Nuart)

RAAJNEETI was not screened in advance of our deadline, but a review will appear here next week, and can be found at laweekly.com/movies. (Culver Plaza, Fallbrook)

SPLICE Though Sundance-screened and sporting an upscale cast, Vincenzo Natali’s Splice has a mad-science quality. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are Clive and Elsa, a married couple of “rock star” genetic engineers who are introduced midwifing the birth of a lab-grown, maggoty sack of tissue, which we’ll soon observe in a mating tango that’ll put you off your popcorn. Clive and Elsa then decide to tamper in God’s domain and toss a soupçon of human DNA into their recipe. What winds up in the incubator is a massive spermatozoon ending in an obscene glans, which hatches a walking skinned rabbit, which develops into an increasingly humanoid girl with a wicked harelip. Though he’ll more than accept their adoptee in time, Clive is understandably creeped out at first by his wife’s coddling treatment of the thing, now christened “Dren.” (Polley’s glowing reaction shots while nestling her mutant toddler make a deadpan joke of parents’ indifferent pride over whatever they’ve hatched.) In spite or because of the portentous, gathering-clouds score and accumulated Freudian gibble gabble, Splice is a queerly funny movie. Natali never drops his poker face, but you can’t tell me a moment like the Big Presentation, where the front row of suits get splattered, isn’t supposed to be a knee-slapper. Of Splice’s various primal scenes, that’s-just-wrong coitus interruptuses and ridiculous dialogues delivered with unfailing conviction (“Was it ever about science?”), I am less certain of the intention. (Nick Pinkerton) (Citywide)