By Roger Moore

FILM: Drive Hard
CAST: John Cusack, Thomas Jane
DIRECTION: Brian Trenchard-Smith

Here’s the sort of scruffy action comedy that suits the post box office-draw careers of one-time hipster John Cusack and fading action star Thomas Jane. It covers the costs of a fun few weeks of working vacation in Australia and provides a few on-screen laughs along the way.
The pairing of these two is kind of a lark. Make Cusack some sort of hit man/crook, a variation on his Grosse Pointe Blank character, and Jane a semi-retired and over-extended race car driver abducted to be the crook’s getaway car driver.
All that can come from that is Drive Hard.
Jane is Peter Roberts, married to an Aussie attorney, father of a smart-mouthed tween. No, we’ve never seen The Punisher like this. He can’t get sponsorship to drive Down Under, so he runs a driving school. That’s where Keller (Cusack) finds him.
The American never takes off his gloves, black baseball cap or shades and only slowly lets on that, aside from sitting on the wrong side of the car and driving on the wrong side of the road, he doesn’t need lessons. As they hurtle up and down Australia’s Gold Coast, the banter comes fast and furious. Especially when Keller gets Roberts to wait for him outside a bank, which the gloved man promptly robs. It’s handy to have a race car driver when you’re in a tiny driving school econo-box trying to outrun the cops.
“You see why I hired you?”
“You DIDN’T hire me, you KIDNAPPED me!”
“SeMANtics.”
Cusack is an old hand at this sort of fast, flippant repartee. So Jane is the real surprise.
The “Hard” driving isn’t very impressive, despite being a film from the land of The Road Warrior. It never rises above the simple formula that got it made. But a couple of dozen random laughs suggest that if Drive Hard is these two leading men’s lot in life, they could do a lot worse. — TNS

A fantasy-thriller

By Michael Phillips

FILM: Self/less
CAST: Ben Kingsley, Ryan Reynolds, Victor Garber
DIRECTION: Tarsem Singh

In the ineffectual new fantasy-thriller Self/less the fantastical plot device — a body-switching process costing millions and not covered by any known health plan — is called “shedding”. You buy yourself a new, longer life in a younger person’s body, and your troubles are over. Or ARE THEY?
Ben Kingsley, sounding like a compendium of every attempt at a New York accent ever heard in the movies, plays Damian Hale, a Trump-like Manhattan developer who beats a terminal cancer prognosis by hooking up with a mysterious biogenic company run by purring, movie-stealing Matthew Goode.
Early on in Self/less, Hale gets zwooped into the body of a new human vessel, portrayed by top-billed Ryan Reynolds.
The intrigue in Self/less, only occasionally intriguing, comes with the complications. When Kingsley’s character turns into Reynolds, his memories are no longer strictly his own.
In his addled mind’s eye the new Hale experiences flashes of another life, a different past. It’s up to this new, strapping version of Hale to figure out what shedding entails, and learn the identity of the woman (Natalie Martinez) he can’t get out of his head.
Director Tarsem Singh’s previous work includes The Cell (Jennifer Lopez in a series of swanky nightmare scenarios) and The Fall, a strange, grandiose, somewhat icky adventure story set in the silent film era. Self/less is much smaller, and not nearly strange or transporting enough.
Reynolds can be charming and effective as a leading man in both comedy and drama, but his somewhat glazed expression and tweezed good looks can work against him. The cast, including ever-reliable Victor Garber as Hale’s longtime friend and colleague, does what it can.
Self/less hews closely enough to the premise of the 1966 John Frankenheimer thriller Seconds to qualify as an unofficial remake. Then again, anyone who remembers that one is not in the target audience for this one. —  Chicago Tribune/TNS

Too much mellow yellow

By Rick Bentley

FILM: Minions
VOICES: Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm, Michael Keaton, Allison Janney
DIRECTION: Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda

It’s the role of a minion to be a servile follower of a person in charge. That means they are resigned to play the supporting role.
That’s the problem with the new animated comedy Minions. The pill-shaped, yellow characters introduced in Despicable Me as the subordinates to the villainous Gru have now taken centre stage. The charm and humour they brought in tiny doses in the previous films now comes in a massive blast that wears thin quickly.
Minions starts with great promise. The long history of the jabbering group is charted from their days as one-cell organisms through their participation in great moments in history. These are entertaining vignettes that last for just a few moments before the action shifts.
The film gets bogged down when the group decides they really need to find an evil boss to lead them. Kevin, Bob and Stuart (all given their mumbling voices by Pierre Coffin) set out to find that leader. Their quest takes them to London in 1968.
They end up in Europe because they believe their new boss should be the wicked Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock). She’s become the world’s leading super villain with some help from her mod husband, Herb Overkill (Jon Hamm).
The original story of finding a leader is then tossed aside to make way for a plot line about how Scarlett wants to steal the queen’s crown as a way of making her feel better about her miserable childhood.
There are funny moments when the Minions make odd sounds or fall down. But the movie feels like a mashup of a Three Stooges story with The Thomas Crown Affair. That mix just doesn’t work here.
The majority of the voice casting works. The biggest mistake is having Hamm voice the role of the bad Brit. Hamm has a great sense of comic timing, but his character always sounds like someone trying to do a bad British accent.
Minions also is missing the heart that was such a part of the Despicable Me films. Because those films had Gru and his growth as the central theme, the Minions only had to be comical accents. Minions lacks that central core, which leaves the story flat.
And the lack of a character like Gru also leaves Minions without a solid foundation to keep adults engaged, other than a wonderful soundtrack. -The Fresno Bee/TNS

DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha