By Roger Moore FILM: StolenCAST: Nicolas Cage, Danny Huston, Malin Akerman, Josh Lucas, Sami GayleDIRECTION: Simon West At some point during the filming of the heist thriller Stolen, in which he plays an FBI agent chasing an elusive master thief (Nicolas Cage), Danny Huston must have said “Waaaaaillll shoo’. I’m-o wear me this heyah porkpie hat from heyah on out. See if I don’t, Cher.”Kind of goes with the accent he seems to acquire the longer his character, Agent Harlend, stays on the case. Huston tries his hand at New Orleans folksy. His assistant is inept. How inept?“Couldn’t find a couch in a livin’ room.”His advice to the lovelorn Will Montgomery (Cage)?“Like my Granny Harlend said, ‘Love makes time pass. But time is certain to make LOVE pass.’”Words to live by. If only Huston had committed to this chatty, drawling take on the guy from the get-go. But that’s a problem the whole movie suffers from — a lack of commitment.Cage, so manic and out there, even in this long run of bad movies he’s been in, doesn’t hurl himself at this shot-in-his-hometown tale. And his Con Air director, Simon West, can’t settle on a tone that works for this story of a thief who gets out of jail only to have his teen daughter kidnapped by a former associate (Josh Lucas).It’s hard to be serious, even in a bloody movie like this one, with all the little Big Easy touches the film has. And it’s hard to be flip and funny when there’s an underage teenage girl (Sami Gayle) locked in the trunk of a New Orleans taxi with time running out.The script puts Will into a stolen police cruiser, a taxi and a few pickup trucks. When they run out of streets to chase him on, he sprints across the roofs of cars in city traffic. It’s Mardi Gras. Everything is at a standstill.Which is a good way to describe Stolen itself. For all the heists, chases and shoot-outs, it’s a sluggish picture. Characters feel the need to stop the action to explain themselves. Thoroughly.Lucas, giving his villain the plummy locutions of a New Orleans “character,” has to tell us why he swiped the girl and how he faked his death. In detail. Will has to explain to his kid why he went to prison. Harlend has to unload bromides, aphorisms and the like to his subordinates. Malin Akerman, playing the robbery gang’s onetime driver, has to speak Swedish.Stolen is all over the place, never quite managing the sense of urgency the story suggests, never mastering the lifestyle tempo that the setting and dialect promise.And Cage, so reliably over the top in so many of the films he’s done in the past five years? He seems a little winded, and lost.The only thing over-the-top here is Huston’s porkpie hat. It’s a shame he didn’t buy everybody else one. — MCTLooking before and afterFILM: 10 YearsCAST: Channing Tatum, Ari Graynor, Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Justin Long, Chris Pratt, Anthony Mackie, Aubrey PlazaDIRECTION: Jamie Linden Nostalgia seems to kick in earlier and younger, at least to those of us of the St Elmo’s Fire or Big Chill generations.Thus, the legion of 28-year-olds getting misty-eyed over high school in 10 Years, a high school reunion dramedy full of alcohol, last-chance romance, memories both bitter and bittersweet, big secrets and bigger revelations.It’s a movie that doesn’t take its own advice — “Why spend your time looking back when you’ve got so much to look forward to?”Writer (Dear John, We Are Marshall) and first-time director Jamie Linden traffics in the soapy, melodramatic clichés of such ensemble pieces. But with sharp casting he pulls off a movie with a dash of wit, a few genuinely poignant moments and a generous helping of grace notes to make the clichés go down easily.Channing Tatum is Jake, the handsome, popular prom king who went on to an exciting life as ... a mortgage broker. At least he has a hot, younger date (Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Tatum’s real-life spouse) to drag with him to Lake Howell High’s 10th reunion.Anna (Lynn Collins of John Carter) shows up alone, the popular party girl from way back still pursued by guys like Marty (Justin Long) and his married pal AJ (Max Minghella). Anna still lords it over the once unpopular kids: “Yes, I had a much better time in high school than you did.”Chris Pratt is aptly cast as Cully, the ex-jock and “reformed” bully who married Sam (Ari Graynor), had kids and adopted a sweater vest as his new uniform. He drinks too much and tries to make amends to everybody he picked on way back when.Reeves (Oscar Isaac) became a pop star, but still crushes on Elise (Kate Mara). Garrity (Brian Geraghty) is married to Olivia (Aubrey Plaza of Parks & Recreation), but never told her about his days as a high school hip-hop wannabe.“You married a WHITE girl, for real?” cracks his old pal Andre (Anthony Mackie).And the list goes on.It’s easy to see how Linden attracted such a star-studded young cast. Most every character has his or her own moment, and many of them deliver lines that stick with you, having a hint of profundity to them.The “big reveals” won’t shock anyone, but they are so well-played that they still manage to move — the love affair, undimmed by the years, the wounds that a decade hasn’t healed, the disappointment at the way life has turned out.10 Years doesn’t reinvent nostalgia and doesn’t do enough with the concept of “the road not taken.” But if enough years have passed for you to miss those days, it’s worth breaking out the rose-coloured glasses for. — By Roger Moore, MCT A bit too wordy to workFILM: The WordsCAST: Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid, Olivia Wilde, Nora Arnezeder, Ben BarnesDIRECTION: Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal The Words is, as its name suggests, a wordy melodrama about a young writer, Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), who finishes his first novel, three years in the making — which is promptly rejected. Maybe, he wonders, he’s not who he thought he was — a writer.Then he stumbles across a yellowed, unpublished manuscript from long ago and sees his salvation, his shortcut to fame.Maybe, he realises, he’s not who he thought he was — an ethical, honest man.Words is a pleasant but overly complex variation on an idea Woody Allen toyed-with in his stumbling You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, this notion of counterfeit literary fame, a stolen manuscript. Rory is cursed with being good enough to recognise the gem he’s stumbled across in an attaché case bought in a Paris antique shop, cursed with knowing this novel is better than anything he’ll ever write. His adoring wife (the luminous Zoe Saldana) can tell him “You are everything you always wanted to be,” but Rory knows better. Every word of praise for this book he copied is a slap at the writer and man he really is.The Words, in a fit of ambition, goes after its themes by telling three stories, each existing within the others.There’s the dull framework of the piece, a book reading by a novelist, Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid), who delivers the beyond-banal lines from his latest novel about “a young struggling writer struggling to make his voice heard.” How did this dullard get to be a famous novelist, with Olivia Wilde as his new wide-eyed groupie, no less?He tells us, after a fashion. Hammond narrates the second story, Rory’s romance with the fair Dora (Saldana). We see Rory’s years of struggle and his discovery of the novel he would ride to fame. And Hammond, giving away the whole novel in this one reading — apparently — tells of the day Rory meets The Old Man, the one person on Earth who recognised this book as his own, written more than half a century earlier, the one man who knows Rory is a fraud.Is Hammond suggesting this is his own secret?Quaid has a nice gravitas, but is saddled with a “book” that makes Hammond come off as a lousy storyteller. Cooper, earnest as ever, nicely underplays Rory’s frustrations but does little to suggest a guy supposedly wracked with guilt over the limo lifestyle he’s stolen.As the Old Man, Jeremy Irons is the best natural storyteller in the cast, lending warmth to very generic narration of post-World War II romance, tragedy and the fervour in which he created the novel that makes Rory famous. Ben Barnes and Nora Arnezeder play the young couple in the Old Man’s flashback within a flashback.Irons has the disarming twinkle of old age, but he can still turn on the steely glint of accusation and menace. No wonder Cooper looks in awe and ill at ease in their scenes together — the best scenes in the movie. — By Roger Moore, MCT(DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)