Mr. Brooks (2007)

Director: Bruce A. Evans

Cast: Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, Dane Cook, William Hurt

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I have a vague memory of watching at some point in the last 18 years, and it has been sitting on my DVD shelf for several years, so I really had to have.

For the entire time I’m sitting there during this viewing and thinking that there would be—and indeed, I had even previously seen—a revelation that William Hurt’s Jiminy Cricket character looks like Costner’s father.

But that isn’t really there. What film was I watching way back when?

Did I Like It: It’s a nice—especially in a pre-Dexter world—premise, telling the story of a seemingly respectable man harboring a monster inside.

The problem with a nice premise is that it will only reliably fuel a trailer. I’m sure the trailer for Mr. Brooks is quite nice. Then again, I couldn’t be troubled to watch that trailer on the DVD, so… I don’t know.

Yes, I do, actually, know. If there is a hypothetical limit to the critical mass of subplots, then Demi Moore’s character in this approached it, if she didn’t shatter it. She’s after Kevin Costner (but doesn’t really know it). She’s tangling with Dane Cook, thinking he has some Kevin Costner energy. He doesn’t, but I’ll get to that here in a bit. She’s also got an ex-husband that’s causing problems. Then she also has another case that is haunting her. All of this, and she is not really the protagonist. That’s too much. So much, in fact that it’s inevitable that all of those elements will make up the parts of the third act, and do so pretty awkwardly.

It’s an awkward ungainly way to do a film.

And against all odds, I only get to the end of this review before I note that I have no idea why Dane Cook is in this film, and he never seems to quite know either. It’s not so great when he’s got to be the catalyst for all these plots.

Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024)

Director: Kevin Costner

Cast: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Giovanni Ribisi*

Have I Seen it Before: No. Tried to orchestrate a delicate movie watching schedule for the 4th of July, only to pick this one, then find my choice for second movie had sold out. The best laid plans, I suppose…

Did I Like It: Which might be the perfect point into which I should enter the review proper. I spend the first half an hour of this film really gearing up for the reality that I’m going to have a uniformly bad time. The villagers of Horizon we meet in the opening of the film are dumb. They are a gentle kind of dumb, but they have invited the disaster that befalls them. Granted, I tend to think that about a lot of people in our own chaotic day and age, but it became clear I might not be the right audience for this.

Then the movie makes it pretty clear that they were duped and are pretty dumb for it as well. That almost wins me over, but the reality is a film that has a wide array of engaging moments, is more often than not content to be pretty run-of-the-mill western, and is pointedly disinterested in having any kind of catharsis (see the apt reference in the footnote about Giovanni Ribisi). It’s stuffed to the brim with characters, and edited with enough lag to the proceedings, I’m really not sure why this didn’t become a prestige television series. It’s going to spend the vast majority of its life watched in essentially that format, why hang everything on theatrical grosses?

The question isn’t really if I’ve ever seen it before, remains will I ever see it again, or watch any of the other parts… Eh. I might wait for it to show up on streaming.

*This year’s winner of the Mark Hamill Award for getting high billing on a movie, despite only appearing for a fleeting, wordless moment at the end of the film… Which was really only a trailer for the forthcoming Chapter 2. That would be kind of like Mary Steenburgen receiving near-top billing for her extensive work in Back to the Future: Part II (1989). I feel like I should get a lot more credit for only mentioning Back to the Future in this review in a footnote.

The Untouchables (1987)

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia, Robert De Niro

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure*.

Did I Like It: I’ve been on a bit of a gangster movie kick as of late, having watched all of The Godfather films recently**, and Lora has taken to dismissing them as “Pacino De Niro Scarface movies.” I don’t know if I’d be willing to back up that assertion, but she came in and out of the room while I was watching the film, and eventually summed up her criticism of stray scenes by saying: “This film is kind of corny.”

Here, she might be on to something. Throw out a couple of truly tension-filled scenes (and even those are cribbed from Eisenstein; it’s not a vice to go watch a silent movie, folks) and there’s a movie occasionally fixated on being strangely old-fashioned. The question then becomes is that quality an earnest attempt to bring the movies back to something resembling a cop show from the 50s? Or is it a stealth commentary on that earnestness so present during those older days? I’m tempted to lean towards the latter. How could we not chuckle at a scene where Ness (Costner) and his wife (Patricia Clarkson, in her feature debut) muse about naming their new infant son after J. Edgar Hoover? Then again, how can we not collectively roll our eyes in any scene of domestic bliss when Morricone’s score positively groans under the weight of its sentimentality?

Then again, how could a movie—if even occasionally—screw up the use of a Morricone score? Is it possible I don’t like this movie… No. I do. I do.

I struggle mightily with expressing why I don’t mind all of those problems, but I don’t.

*I was definitely tempted at that moment to impart an anecdote where I once made a political speech based mostly on quotes from Sean Connery in this film. I won’t tell that story but will say: Don’t do that, but if you do, don’t worry about it. Hardly anyone will get it.

**Director’s cut on Part III, I’m not an animal.

Dances with Wolves (1990)

Director: Kevin Costner

Cast: Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene, Rodney Grant

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I’m not entirely sure why, but a nearly four hour run time has probably scared me off for over thirty years. Is it even possible to get a hold of the theatrical cut—the one that everyone loved so damned much—on disc?

Did I Like It: It’s rare that a four hour movie becomes is best self in the final quarter of the runtime. All of the fat in this special edition cut is up front. Sure, a little bit of Dunbar’s (Costner, pulling Welles-ian triple duties as Star, Director, and Producer) life before coming to the frontier can buttress not just character development but story logic, but the full hour we spend seeing him encounter death in the Civil War, becoming an improbable war hero, requesting to escape the world around him in favor of the frontier, finding that frontier does not reflect his prejudices, and then embracing his isolation could have been—and presumably, were—handled with much more brevity in another version of the film.

Characters like Major Fambrough (Maury Chaykin) and Timmons (Robert Pastorelli) might even be able to prop up an entire (probably less affecting) film in their own right. Here, they are merely added color to fuel a plot that should have already been underway by the time they are dispatched. By the end of the film, I’m feeling a great deal of affection and sadness for the Sioux as depicted here, and have all but forgotten the early parts of the film which dragged. In fact, the only thought I give the first hour is wondering how in the hell Dunbar survived a quickly infecting wound at the time that he did.

All of this is symptomatic of a problem Costner would display to greater detriment later in his career. As an actor, he has a fine presence. Sure, he would be miscast in things like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and astonishingly well-case (if underserved by the writing) in Man of Steel (2013), but he is certainly a movie star for the ages. As a behind-the-scenes force he was far too over validated far too early in is attempts, that he lost all sense of what is (or ought) to be part of the film at hand, and what isn’t. Thus, we’re eventually left with things like Waterworld (1995) and The Postman (1997). Art thrives in restriction, so there was very little hope that an expanded cut of Dances with Wolves would somehow improve upon what might have rationalized such an exercise in the first place.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

Director: Kevin Reynolds

Cast: Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, Alan Rickman

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Flashback to 1991 for just a moment, and I even had a full range of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves toys (even if they were just a pretty feeble repackaging of Kenner’s Return of the Jedi toys from 1983. Seriously. They just slightly repainted an Ewok’s face to make Friar Tuck. Look it up.

Did I Like It: There is plenty to like about the film. It’s core identity as a film is that of a competent 90s actioner. There are explosions, and jumps, and fights, and a thumping orchestral score (which, for reasons passing my immediate understanding became the music behind the Walt Disney Studios vanity card after a while).

Morgan Freeman is quite good in a thankless, undercooked, and probably ill-considered, but he’s been the best thing in plenty of bad things. Some great actors just like to work. Alan Rickman is a cartoon confection of a villain, but understands the job ahead of him perfectly and you marvel at the fact that, in what amounted to his three most memorable roles, he plays the villain, or at the very least an anti-hero. In the Harry Potter films, he milks every moment out of the pathos available to him. In Die Hard (1988) he is a coiled snake of ruthless intelligence. In this film, he’s Sindely Whiplash. And all are equally valid.

The problem is, that there’s something rotten at the core of the movie, and it is its star. Much was made in the years immediately after the films release about Costner not playing the hero of Sherwood Forrest with an English accent, but you forget how wobbly the whole enterprise is if you haven’t seen it in a while. Costner feebly attempts a more formal tone of speaking, as if that will serve, but even that is inconsistent. It’s only somewhat his fault, as the very idea of casting him in the role is a bad one. At his core, he’s too all-American. The corpse in The Big Chill (1983)? Sure. Pa Kent? Absolutely. He’s not an Englishman. But, sadly, he was a bit too big after Dances with Wolves (1990) and no one could say no.

Ultimately, it kind of makes it akin to Star Wars — Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) in that way, a fine piece of blockbuster entertainment with a single unbelievable performance at it that brings the whole affair down. 

I didn’t think as I was starting to write this review that I was going to offer quite so many Star Wars comparisons in this review, but here we are. 

No Way Out (1987)

Director: Roger Donaldson

Cast: Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Will Patton, Sean Young

Have I Seen it Before: It lived on cable in the 90s. Most people probably saw the last few minutes—which pretty much negates the need to see the movie at all—before catching an airing of something else.

Did I Like It: The question becomes during a normal screening of the film: Does it earn it’s ending? 

On the tragic vibe it occasionally goes for, I’m going to say no. The relationship between Farrell (Costner), and Atwell (Young) is not so much established as it is preposterous revved from 0-60 in the span of the first reel. I’m not kidding. Scene 1: They Meet and don’t care much for each other. Scene 2: They have sex. Scene 3: They are so ridiculously in love that when she dies, his emotional distress makes more sense…

…except, it doesn’t. It’s all a ruse. Maybe Farrell got in too deep to keep up his cover (last chance for spoilers) as a Soviet agent, but there’s not a hint or an ounce of suspicion that he isn’t who he says he is until his handlers start speaking Russian?

I guess the ending doesn’t really work for me on any front. Even if it were a surprise, it’s too out of left field. As is the sudden shift in motivation when Pritchard (Patton) that allows the movie to swing wildly toward something resembling a resolution to its plot.

There’s at least some of the trappings of an 80s tech-thriller that I’m here for, and the film incorporates location shooting in Washington DC better than most films, but when it’s central reason for existing falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, that should tell us all something, right?

Man of Steel (2013)

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe

Have I Seen it Before: Yep.

Did I Like It: Honestly, kind of? I know that’s strange to hear from me, when I’ve been so blissfully, aggressively down on the follow-up, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)*, but there is something to this film that I find imminently watchable. 

The casting is top notch all around. I don’t think Russell Crowe has ever been a better action hero than his spin on Jor-El, and makes him seem like more of a man than the distant God-like figure filled in by Marlon Brando in years past. For that matter, between unseen corpses in The Big Chill (1983) and certain Princes of Thieves, Kevin Costner has been miscast more than a few times, but Pa Kent is not one of those. Also, Richard Schiff is in it. That’s very nearly worth a Michael Keaton or two in my book.

It’s true strength is this: eschewing the slavish devotion to the Christopher Reeve/Richard Donner films that perhaps weighed down Superman Returns (2006), this film surprisingly tries to turn the story of the last son of Krypton coming to Earth to live among humanity into an actual alien invasion story.

It’s such a simple and refreshing take on the mythos that I’m tempted to give the film a pass on any flaws that can’t be avoided. Anyone who lives in the midwest will probably find stumbling on a tornado as a pretty unlikely set of circumstances, to say nothing for the fact that having Pa Kent eat it in the middle of cyclone falls far short of the pathos-filled slow heart attack which took out Glenn Ford. The third act is notoriously wall-to-wall disaster porn, and the choice to have Superman (Cavill) kill Zod (Michael Shannon) in something approaching cold bold feels antithetical to the purity of the character. That’s because it is. But at least here, it stems from the rest of the film as presented, and it isn’t exactly like it’s a lazy coincidence that resolves all of the tension in the movie.

For that, we’d have to wait for the sequel.

*Even five years later, that title is an absolute chore to type.