Effective premise
FILM: The Numbers Station
CAST: John Cusack, Malin Akerman, Liam Cunningham, Lucy Griffiths
DIRECTION: Kasper Barfoed
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Perhaps the most vulnerable moment in any clandestine world is when communication occurs. The higher-ups need to know that their messages are getting through to their agents, and agents need to know that their orders are valid.
Face-to-face meetings ensure validity but also expose everyone to risk, so other forms of communication are preferred. One of those is the so-called “numbers station”. In a predetermined location on a predetermined radio band, a voice announces a series of numbers. To you or me they sound like a string of random digits, but to the trained operative with the right codebook they reveal a world of hidden messages and sets of instructions. It’s in everyone’s best interest to keep these numbers stations secure - agents have to trust the numbers and so do their handlers.
It’s against this clandestine (and mostly fictional) backdrop of number stations that have been the fodder of conspiracy theorists for decades) that The Numbers Station is set. Though it contains some game performances from its leads, the film is bogged down in formula from the beginning.
Emerson (John Cusack) is a black-ops agent who’s been assigned to babysitting duties at a numbers station after he loses his mettle in the field. He’s assigned to guard Katherine (Malin Akerman), a numbers station worker. Unlike most bodyguards, though, Emerson’s real task is to protect the code, not Katherine. When their station comes under fire, Emerson has some hard decisions to make.
The watchword for The Numbers Station is simple: modesty. Nothing about the film really tries to aim for the fences. Unlike many low-budget flicks that try to pepper their narratives with stunts and shenanigans outside their budget, The Numbers Station takes a simple premise, a few good actors, and some low-key twists to blend up a decent B-level thriller.
It all starts with a simple, fairly effective premise. On the one hand, we’ve got the bodyguard storyline: Emerson is disillusioned, Katherine is still wide-eyed, but we don’t know what they’ll do under pressure. Emerson’s job is to protect the code, but we don’t know if he’s still loyal enough to the job to pull the trigger (and neither does Katherine, which works in the movie’s favour).
The other main component of the storyline is the siege plot. It doesn’t take long before everything moves into the bunker that is the titular numbers station. After that it becomes the usual game of cat-and-mouse, with Emerson and Katherine on one side and the psychopath villain on the other. Siege plots have structured countless movies, and The Numbers Station makes a virtue of its limited location.
Despite being limited to a handful of rooms, director Kasper Barfoed continually finds ways to keep things interesting. However, the true benefit of these “limitations” is to keep the focus solely on the interplay between Emerson, Katherine and their opponent, Max.
That limited focus is not a problem because of the cast. John Cusack may have grown up playing goofy, rubbery-faced teens in the eighties, but he can be surprisingly menacing when he turns down the charm and lets a cold gleam slip into his gaze. The fact that he looks like he should be charming and approachable only makes him more effective as the world-weary but deadly Emerson. Malin Akerman hasn’t been given many opportunities to show her range as an actress; she’s usually relegated to the bubbly best friend role. However, she makes that work for her here, as Katherine is the opposite of Emerson’s closed off, weary operative. She’s all spark and go-getter attitude which means the two play off each other well.- Gordon Sullivan /DVD Verdict
Too many twists
FILM: Charlie Zone
CAST: Amanda Crew, Glen Gould, Pasha Ebrahimi
DIRECTION: Michael Melski
A very (Glen Gould) is a former boxer who has hit rock bottom, reduced to taking beatings in underground fight clubs. A family hires him to find their daughter Jan (Amanda Crew), who has run away from home and has shacked up with a bunch of drug addicts. Avery gets her out of the crack house and they hit the road. That’s when he discovers this girl’s connections to the criminal underworld go deeper than he ever guessed.
First things first: There’s no character in Charlie Zone. The title comes from police lingo referring to the neighbourhood where the crack house is located.
Once Avery gets Jan out of there, she sobers up a little, and we learn there’s a lot more to her character than just a victim. She shows a lot of intelligence, and has a real desire to get clean. This makes her a mirror of sorts for Avery, who is haunted by all the poor mistakes of his past.
Glen Gould goes the subtle route as Avery, keeping the character’s anger just beneath the surface. Late in the film, he reconnects with some folks from his past, and it’s at this point we get a glimpse of Avery’s underlying humanity. Amanda Crew has the more show-offy performance, as her character constantly transitions from tough to vulnerable to back again. Fortunately, Crew makes it so that it never seems inconsistent, but the portrayal of a young woman who has great potential but is over her head because of her self-destructive ways.
Character development and interaction are good, but the plot lets these characters down. Like a lot of crime movies, this one piles on plot twist after plot twist after plot twist. Instead of increasing the stakes and upping action, the twists are to the movie’s detriment. As the criminal conspiracy after Jan goes deeper and deeper, the plot gets less and less believable. We also get more and more layers to Jan as she eventually reveals the real reason she wants to get clean, and it comes off like a convenience rather than an emotional payoff. Also, some characters get lost in the mix. — Mac McEntire/DVD Verdict
Cheap shriek scares
By Roger Moore
FILM: The Last Exorcism Part II
CAST: Ashley Bell, Julia Garner, Louis Herthum
DIRECTION: Ed Gass-Donnelly
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OK, so it wasn’t The Last Exorcism after all. Here’s Part II, an 88-minute bore without the nervy, shaky-camera found-footage conceit, without the doubting exorcist’s moment of truth, without the chills of demonic possession thrills that the low-budget original film served up.
Part II is every bit as cheap and far more generic, nothing more than a run-of-the-mill ghost story.
Ashley Bell, as Nell, seems exhausted, frazzled, out of her acting league and nowhere near her teen years in this sequel. Nell has stumbled into New Orleans, hounded during Mardi Gras even as she tries to convince doctors and those in a mental health halfway house that “I’m not crazy”.
But she’s seeing her dead daddy (Louis Herthum). She’s hearing voices.
Dogs bark at her passing, gorillas in the zoo act up. And every Mardi Gras reveller in a scary mask stares her down. Frank (Muse Watson), who runs Deveroux Halfway House, could not be more wrong when he assures her, “Whatever you’re running from won’t find you here.”
Last Exorcism II is a slower than slow thriller built around Bell, who isn’t at her most subtle or empathetic here. There’s fear and the burden of “If he seduces you, all hope is lost”. Not that Bell gets that across. There’s no urgency to the performance, or that of anybody else trying to save poor Nell from Hell.
It’s a film of cheap shriek scares and fizzing frights that pack no punch. The tropes of the genre are there. But the effects are skimpy and cheesy, with that crazy contortion business that the first Last Exorcist took to new extremes rarely used.
Filmmaker Ed Gass-Donnelly sets too much of the action in broad daylight, which isn’t spooky. The dull acting doesn’t hide that there’s not enough story to justify setting this in Voodooville, USA - New Orleans.
So one can only hope that when the say The Last Exorcism, that they mean it.- MCT
(DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)