Filmmaker John Frankenheimer has made a few good films with a few good men, not least among them the classic thriller The Manchurian Candidate with Frank Sinatra.
It is sad then to watch him churn out such a routine Hollywood caper-thriller as Reindeer Games, a mediocre movie about a con, a robbery and a love affair gone bad.
Shot in B.C. and set in the U.S., the movie is from an original story written by Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road). It is set at the Christmas holidays, making one wonder why it wasn't released as originally intended last December.
In any case, Ben Affleck plays a convict who hooks up with his cellmate's pen pal when he gets out. That would be Theron. Soon enough, after a lusty romp in the sack with her, Affleck suddenly finds himself embroiled in a robbery scam.
Seems that Gary Sinise is Theron's psycho brother. Tired of trucking, he and his 18-wheeler buddies want to rob a native-run, rural Michigan casino where Affleck's cellmate used to work. Trouble is, they think Affleck is the cellmate.
So all hell breaks loose, culminating in the Christmas Eve caper with all the thugs wearing Santa suits. There are crosses, double-crosses, pretzel plot twists and enough bloodshed to start your own slaughterhouse.
At times Reindeer Games looks as if it was directed by Frankenstein, not Frankenheimer. It lurks, it lurches, it looms. You want to kill it. You want to run away.
Yet, just when you are ready to storm out of the cinema and launch a rant, up pops a scene that is so slick, so chilling and so subversively funny that you're jolted.
Suddenly, in those silky-smooth moments of moving pictures and people talking, Frankenheimer's craft and intelligence, generated in a 44-year career of making films, is in full glorious display. A chase scene, with Affleck and Theron both dropping like dead weights through the thin ice of a frozen lake and struggling to escape, is one of those sequences.
Just as abruptly, however, you are wrenched out of the reverie and dumped back in the saddle of a lame horse going nowhere. It doesn't help that baby-faced, Bambi-eyed Affleck is supposed to play a tough guy. Now that's a joke. He looks like he could be jailed for baking cookies, not for grand theft auto.
As for his co-stars, Theron is a hot enough femme fatale with just enough trailer-park trash in her strut to make her character work, and Sinise is an inspired villain because he can generate an aura of psychosis just by widening his eyes.
But, as the story crashes on to its absurd and blood-splattered finale, more and more effort is needed to explain what just happened. Not that I ever really cared. Endless exposition at the end of an action sequence is always too deflating.
So the movie disappoints audiences, Manchurian Candidate fans and maybe even John Frankenheimer himself. He's smart. He has to know this is beneath him.
(This film is rated AA)
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