Deadfall
Starring Eric Bana, Olivia Wilde, Kris Kristofferson, Sissy Spacek and Treat Williams. Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky.
Rating: 14A
Advisory: coarse language, sexual content, graphic violence
Running time: 94 minutes
Two and a half stars out of five
Definitely not to be confused with the other ?fall? movie at a theatre near you, Deadfall is one of those rare films that is difficult to describe, mostly because it?s hard to tell what it?s trying to be.
Some mutant cross between a Coen brothers thriller and a CBC original drama (I mean that in the best possible way, of course), Deadfall is a story of two highly dysfunctional siblings and their marginally creepy dynamic as a Bonnie and Clyde duo.
Eric Bana is Addison and Olivia Wilde plays his baby sister Liza. They?re an attractive pair, but they do some very ugly things. We see just how bad they can be from the opening frames, when Addison shoots a police trooper in the head.
From this moment forward, it?s almost impossible to like Addison or Liza as they go their separate ways in an attempt to flee the law.
Arthur Penn faced a similar challenge in his 1967 outlaw classic starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, but he closed the noose around the neck of his audience by making his criminals irresistibly sexy and fun to watch.
Director Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters) tries to pull off a similar black magic, but Deadfall tends to spin its wheels in a snowdrift of blown plot elements. There are just too many things happening at the same time for us to really focus on any single emotional through-line.
For instance, once we meet Addison and Liza, we stumble into the fixed jaw of recently released criminal Jay (Charlie Hunnam from Sons of Anarchy) ? a nice guy who spent a year in prison for taking a fall in his last fight.
The conviction put Jay in the doghouse with his family, especially his dad (Kris Kristofferson). But his mom (Sissy Spacek) understands, and she?s trying to convince Jay to spend the Thanksgiving weekend with the family.
Jay would say yes, if he didn?t think he was on the verge of being arrested one more time ? this time for something far more serious.
Cut back to Addison and Eliza, exiled in a frozen wilderness without any real means to survive for more than a day. Eliza decides to stand in the road and wait for help ? and the first person to drive by is none other than Jay, the angry young man with a father complex.
Meanwhile, Addison is walking through knee-deep snow in dress pants and a city coat carrying a briefcase filled with cash. He should look like a man standing on the gallows, with fear of the ultimate end glistening in his eye.
Yet, thanks to Bana?s dense screen presence and coal black eyes, he reads like a shark swimming around a sick seal.
The predatory edge in Addison as well as Liza and Jay ? not to mention just about everyone else in the movie ? brings unity to the film thematically, but too many blades leave the script bleeding and Ruzowitzky has no ready cure.
Incapable of applying a narrative tourniquet to staunch the loss of suspense and the dilution of character, Deadfall fragments from scene to scene instead of fusing.
By the time we reach the grand finale, where all the players are united on one set, we may have lost our patience with this unreliable vehicle ? but it?s still worth the wait, even if the results are predictable.
Spacek and Kristofferson have little to do, but they do it well. The same goes for Wilde, who finally gets a chance to stretch and truly act ? albeit briefly ? instead of gaze into the camera with those Manga-sized eyes.
The real treat is Bana, who may have taken one too many pages from the Great Big Book of Bond Villains in his portrayal of a pleasant psychopath, but nonetheless manages to cast a spell over the viewer.
Proof of that spell is the empathy he conjures, evil deeds and all. If the rest of the emotional jigsaw puzzle had been assembled with such care to detail, Deadfall could have been a film in the vein of Blood Simple ? a dark thriller with dramatic flourishes and quirky humour. Instead, it?s a film with too many limbs and a bad case of hypothermia, wandering around the snowy woods before drifting off into an endless fairy tale sleep.
Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/12/06/movie-review-deadfall/
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