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No stars: Waste of time LEBANON
Four young Israelis forced to look war dead in the eyes
by Stephanie Merry
THE LAST EXORCISM
A preacher sets out to prove exorcisms are a sham, and then he meets Nell. 30
MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT
Feels like we’ve seen this mobster film somewhere before. 31
ANIMAL KINGDOM
A compelling tale of a dysfunctional family at its darkest. 31
PLUS
Family Filmgoer 32 DVDs 33
OPENING NEXT WEEK
George Clooney is a hit man in The American. ... Centurion is set during the
second-century Roman conquest of Britain. . . . A summer fling lasts longer than expected in Going the Distance. . . . A knife-wielding vigilante is out to seek revenge in Machete. ... Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 is the second half of the saga about the French criminal. . . . The Tillman Story is a documentary exploring the death of NFL star Pat Tillman.
SUZANNE TENNER
Michael Ealy, left, and Chris Brown are part of the big — maybe too big — cast of “Takers.” TAKERS
Bang-bang story needs more heat
by John Anderson
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It’s not quite clear during the opening mo- ments of the gun-crazy, chase-happy “Takers” whether director John Luessenhop is trying to reinvent the heist movie or searching for the Holy Grail — i.e., a hetero-male version of “Sex and the City”: luxurious clothes, hipster cars, fat cigars, big guns (of course), women as drapery — you know, all the cool stuff, shot like porn. But after its brief attempt at being a homicid- al “Entourage,” “Takers” eventually settles into a caper-flick groove, largely because it takes its cues from some far superior films, namely “Oceans 11/12/13” and Michael Mann’s “Heat.” Like the George Clooney/Brad Pitt crime com- edies, “Takers” assembles a group of suave, handsome, vaguely funny and chronically dys- functional criminals who join forces to make a big killing. Like “Heat,” it begins with one crime, a bank robbery, and builds up to another, the seizing of an armored car carrying $30 million, which will be accomplished by blowing up an entire Los Angeles intersection. In between, the movie puts its equally sympathetic cops and
robbers in parallel motion toward a cataclysmic collision, but not before making them Real Hu- man Beings. Everybody has personal problems. Gang lead-
er Gordon (the supremely charismatic Idris El- ba) has to choreograph the big score while try- ing to keep his reprobate sister (Marianne Jean- Baptiste) in rehab. He’s also trying to dismiss some nagging doubts about Ghost (rapper T.I.), a former member of the robbery gang who took the rap before, served six years in prison and is back, carrying an outsize chip on his shoulder. On the other side of the criminal-justice aisle,
Detective Jack Welles (Matt Dillon) neglects his young daughter while obsessively trying to piece together a mosaic of clues that don’t quite seem to connect Gordon to the gun-toting Jake (Michael Ealy) or the strategist Johnny (Paul Walker) or the useless Jesse (Chris Brown) or Rat-Pack wannabe A.J. (Hayden Christensen), or any of them to the bank robbery that opened the movie. Meanwhile, Jack’s partner, Eddie (Jay Hernandez), is being scrutinized by Internal Af- fairs; Ghost is simmering because his old girl-
takers continued on 30
Drones and other unmanned “ambassa- dors of death” have made killing from afar a fairly uncomplicated task. The dead are nameless, faceless entities, dots on a map. But the Israeli film “Lebanon,” based on the life of writer-director Samuel Maoz, rein- states the terrible intimacy of battle, giving a zoomed-in view of combat through the plight of four inexperienced soldiers during the start of the first Lebanon war in 1982. While the title alone may send people into
a tizzy, this actually isn’t a movie about which side is right or wrong so much as a film about war in general — the messiness of it, the fact that most choices aren’t tidy ones and how even acts of wartime humanity feel muddied by the circumstances. The winner of the 2009 Golden Lion at the
Venice Film Festival, the movie offers some- thing fresh for the genre; all the action takes place inside a tank, giving the oppressive feeling that the four young men (plus occa- sional visitors) are performing their duties while folded into a sofa bed. The only view of the outside world is through an often ob- structed periscope. The group’s first task seems straight-
lebanon continued on 30
29 PG
SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
Oshri Cohen, left, as Hertzel and Itay Tiran as Assi, tank crew members in “Lebanon.”
K
THE WASHINGTON POST • FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 2010
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