The Fighter (4/5 Stars)

About Mickey who can't get a word in.

Director David O. Russell’s new boxing drama is about the real life Mickey Ward’s fall and comeback to the World Welterweight Championship. But to say it is about Mickey, played by Mark Wahlberg, is to assume something else. It is also about his family: his brother Dickie, his mother and his five sisters. Mickey may as well be synonymous with them as he can hardly ever get a word in whenever they are around. Mickey may be in the ring but he isn’t in charge. Several times he even says, “Dickie taught me everything I know,’ or “I won that fight because Dickie told me what to do.” The problem is that his family is telling him the wrong things to do, like say fight a guy twenty pounds heavier than he is with absolutely no preparation. And then there’s the fact that Dickie is a crackhead and that his sisters really don’t do anything but sit around the house, smoke cigarettes, and agree with their mother no matter how obviously wrong she is. Mickey’s future success depends on ditching his blood and finding other smarter people to tell him what to do. Is this movie anti-family or just the least pro-family movie you’ve seen in a long while? There’s a good topic for discussion after the film. A Gold Star to anyone who has balls enough to take their family to see this one.

The most impressive thing about this movie is that it is full of great performances. Leading the pack is Christian Bale as Dickie Ward, the motor-mouthed, crack-addicted, sparring partner and older brother of Mickey. The effect is almost immediate. The first frame shows Christian sitting on the couch talking very fast and his eyes nearly bugging out of his emaciated frame. I couldn’t believe it. Christian did it again. He completely transformed his body to play a role. For those who unaware, Christian has been putting on and taking off weight for the last ten years as if his body was made of Play-Doh. Take a look at his perfect body in “American Psycho,” which turned into thinnest man outside of a concentration camp in “The Machinist” which turned into the muscled action star in “Batman Begins” which turned into the starving prisoner of war in “Rescue Dawn” which once again turned into an action star in “The Dark Knight,” and is now the skinny shriveled figure of a crack addict in “The Fighter.” To think all he could have been looking like Patrick Bateman (“You can always be thinner, look better.”) all this time. The man has no ego at all. He is pure dedication and self-discipline. His poster and movies should be passed out as inspirational devices in all WeightWatchers. As far as his performance goes in this movie, it is perfect. Dickie looks and talks like he’s on crack and all his self-aggrandized tales of the past and deluded plans for the future pretty much steals every scene. He is being followed by a documentary crew, which he thinks is making a movie about his comeback. In reality they are documenting the perils of crack addiction. Dickie doesn’t get that until about halfway through watching the HBO special. In many ways, Christian is playing against type in this movie. He usually has the role of the boring straight character that holds together a movie like say Batman as opposed to the Joker, or the non-showy magician in “The Prestige,” or Patrick Bateman who isn’t even there. Here he proves that he can play the wild part and yet in perfect Bale style he still does a great job of helping everyone else give great performances as well.

Playing against Dickie for control over Mickey is the new girlfriend, played by Amy Adams, who is also playing against type in one of her best performances. You may remember her as the naive nurse in “Catch Me if You Can,” or the Disney Princess in “Enchanted,” or the timid nun in “Doubt.” Here, she is a hard and fierce barmaid who can hold her own against a very large and loud family. There is an unbelievable scene where the mom, played by Melissa Leo (who I didn’t even recognize until I saw the credits), and the five sisters pack into a four-door sedan and take a trip across town to confront Adams. Then they all yell at each other on the porch while poor Mickey stands around looking like he might have something to say if he could possibly get a word in.  

Every now and then you watch a movie with what is called, “Culture Shock.” This is when you are presented with something that seems real but is so foreign and weird you can hardly believe that real people would be doing it. That happened several times while I watched this movie, but one scene really stood out. One of the main problems with the girlfriend as far as the family is concerned is that she went to college. Now the girlfriend actually never finished college, but to the family that is still enough to condemn her into a snobbish elite that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Specifically they call her an “MTV skank.” Like I said, that sort of thing for me goes beyond merely insulting or absurd and into something like disbelief or confusion. It’s just so out there I don’t know what to think. I actually hesitated writing this review because so much of the movie took place in an alternate universe where people are like that. But hey, that is what watching movies is all about. Perhaps now if I were to be called something worse than an “MTV skank,” for actually finishing college, I wouldn’t be caught completely speechless. Maybe.

The movie takes place in the 1990s. Biopics are becoming pretty recent for someone my age. We also seem to be getting into the era where a movie in a theater is not the first, but the second or third time a story is told. In this movie Director Russell does a very good job of dodging all the other camera crews in the story, first the HBO documentary and then the highly televised boxing matches. The world is becoming such a documented place that we are now watching cameras watching cameras. Who knows where the road goes?

p.s. Now that I think about it, here is the retort. I’ll quote Jack Nicholson in “The Departed” after Leonardo Dicaprio has just finished saying that school is done, out. His exact words: “Maybe someday you’ll grow the fuck up.”

TRON: Legacy (3/5 Stars)

If Sam doesn’t care why should I?

Tron is above all other things a visually stunning movie. The artists behind this movie have created an entire new universe stacked with digital skyscrapers, innovative sports arenas, and fantastical vehicles. Clearly, a lot of love, thought, and money went into the design of this movie. The huge problem is that nobody in the movie notices it. The characters walk around nonplussed and unimpressed with their surroundings and that unenthusiasm trickles right through to the audience. If the people in the story don’t care, why should we?

TRON: Legacy has been put in the hands of a first time director named Joseph Kosinski. It brings back Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, from the original movie (which I haven’t seen) and also introduces his son Sam Flynn, played by Garrett Hedlund. The story setup is thus: Kevin Flynn is a game designer working on something big that will change everything about technology, philosophy, and theology. It will ‘change the world,’ he tells his nine year old son as leaves the house to make the latest breakthrough at the office. He never comes back. Twenty-one years later, Sam Flynn is all grown up and living the life of the down-to-earth very rich. His apartment is made out of storage containers but is located on the riverfront and has an awesome view. He also has really cool gadgets and a great bike but this is balanced out by having a cute dog. And even though he apparently doesn’t have a job nor has worked a day in his life, that doesn’t mean he’s not smart or ambitious. He’s just not a fan of the big bad corporate men who have taken over his father’s company. So he’s biding his time till I don’t know, he steps into his father’s shoes and “changes the world,” or something.

That is until his godfather gets a page from his father Kevin, asking him to go down to the shop. So after the usual protest that he doesn’t want to, he goes to the office, quickly finds the secret passageway behind the TRON video game, accidentally activates a computer thingamajig, and is warped/digitally rendered into the confines of an infinite universe contained in a computer chip. The universe is bathed in a cool digital blue, everything seems to run on tracks, and you kind of have to see it to sort of get it (see above trailer). Almost immediately he is picked up by this weird “m” shaped ship full of dangerous red robots. They take him straight to a sports arena where he is forced to duel to the death other robots with Killer Frisbees. 

Sam takes all of this remarkably in stride. I wouldn’t say Garrett is a bad actor because he is not much different than your ordinary absurdly stoic male action star. Extraordinary things only slightly perturb him from time to time. (If the above had happened to me, my reaction would be probably be along the lines of: “OMG What the Hell Is Going ON? What is this Place! Don’t kill me! AAHHH!!!” or something like that.) And yes he has never seen a Killer Frisbee before but that doesn’t mean he isn’t confident that he is better at the sport than robots supposedly programmed to know what they are doing.

After several games, which look like they should be much more dangerous than they actually are, Sam is rescued by a beautiful mystery girl, played by Olivia Wilde, who takes him “off the grid” to his long-lost father’s secret lair. There he meets his Dad for the first time in twenty years and is mercifully allowed by the writers of the movie to have a single tear run down his cheek. They don’t have much to say to each other though. Over a dinner of weird digital food filled with awkward pauses, the father finally asks, “I would guess that you have many questions?” To which Sam responds, “I only have one.” And then I finally had to laugh because the situation had gotten too absurd. Here’s a list of questions that I would have asked: Ahem, What the fuck is this place? How did you build it? How long did it take you to build it? What did you use to build it with? Who designed all of it? Who was the weird evil guy that looked like you? Why have you aged and he hasn’t? How does a stick turn into a motorcycle? Why can’t the motorcycles go ‘off the grid?’ What would happen to if I met with a Killer Frisbee? Do these robots have feelings or personalities? How did they get those personalities? And of course the most glaringly obvious question of all: Who the hell is the girl sitting at this table eating dinner with us? Earlier she had taken Sam on a tour of the lair and showed him the library. She especially likes Jules Verne. Okay, so she just saved your life, is smoking hot, AND she reads books. Now would be the perfect time to ask if she’s a robot. The question Sam asks instead is, “Why didn’t you come home that night?” That’s an okay question I guess, but seriously, is that really the only one? This kid is severely lacking in the area of imagination.

Some of those questions are eventually answered but only until the movie’s second half, and that is where things slow down considerably. Or that they ramp up. Or both in the sense that the movie’s stakes ramp up, but are so off-the-wall that it bored me considerably. In this movie, we are presented with an evil twin villain named CLUE who at one point goes so far as to hold a Nazi-style mass rally. What exactly is he planning to do? Invade the real world and take it over maybe, although how is never explained. Should anyone be worried? Given CLUE’s utter incompetence in using his army of baddies to stop three good guys, not really. Let me make a little contrast here. Last week I saw “Jackass 3D.” In that movie there was a segment called “TeeBall” where Ryan Dunn hits a TeeBall stand that then twirls around and strikes Steve-O in the balls. That segment was more effective than most of the drama in “TRON.” I can definitively say that I know what getting hit in the balls is all about. I haven’t a clue what’s going on here. My point is that it is better to have a villain that does little things that make sense than one who does big things in some vague pseudo-alarming way. If you’re going to make an epic about genocide and world domination, you better know enough about the subject to allow the audience to take it seriously. Otherwise it’s exactly what it is: Hollow and Absurd. And if the movie is like that, all those quiet melodramatic scenes where the actors talk seriously about their feelings just don’t work and take forever. What this movie should have done is gotten rid of the whole “Hitler” thing and just had the stakes tied to the games in the arena. Have a tournament or something with the ultimate prize being a father-son-hot girl ticket home to reality. The heavy drama would be gone, the action would still be packed, and the story would much more effective because it made sense.

This movie looks like it cost a hell of a lot of money to make. There’s nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong however in putting little to no effort into the dialogue or the characters. Jeff Bridges seems to be improvising lines from the Big Lebowski. Garret Hedlund is blank slate. Olivia Wilde looks great but doesn’t do much else. CLUE is creeping around the uncanny valley. The only actor that seems to be enjoying himself is Michael Sheen. I was tempted to wonder why a robot would be British and gay but overall I’m just glad he was there. Too bad he’s the last character introduced and the first one killed off.  And for some reason Cillian Murphy, one of the most accomplished actors of the cast, was hired for only one scene. Perhaps thirty years from now somebody will finally get this story right.

Jackass 3D (4/5 Stars)

Oh HAHAHA Aw-F***! OMG Eww Gross!

Okay well, where the hell do we start with this? I guess in light of the extreme courage/stupidity that went into the making of this movie and I suppose in solidarity with the cast members who risked their lives for my shits and giggles the least I can do is put aside all notions of snobbery and be honest about how I reacted to this movie. I laughed hard and loud. I was grossed out and had to shield my eyes from the screen. I groaned and gasped so routinely and unexpectedly that I sometimes surprised myself by how loud I was being (everyone else in the theater was loud too, so it was okay.) I had been grinning so much that my mouth actually hurt when I left the theater. If it wasn’t for several scenes so disgusting I couldn’t possibly recommend watching them to anyone, I would enthusiastically suggest this movie to anybody I wouldn’t ask for a job or go on a date with.

“Jackass 3D,” is a documentary about a bunch of idiots named Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Bam Margera, Ryan Dunn, Jason ‘Wee Man’ Acuna, Preston Lacy, Chris Pontius, Ehren McGhehey, and Dave England. It is directed by Jeff Tremaine. ‘Jackass’ started as a TV show on MTV in 2000. The pilot episode featured Knoxville being tasered, maced, and then donning a bulletproof vest and shooting himself in the chest. Ten years later, he and his friends (now in their thirties) are still doing really dumb and dangerous things, except now they have a huge budget and the best cameras available.

One of the main reasons why comedy isn’t as respected as drama is because it is very hard to do comedy on a pedestal. Laughing at somebody is much easier if you feel superior to them. Now this doesn’t mean you have to be stupid to be a good clown, but the best and smartest clowns are masters of perfecting that paradoxical act of being smart and creative while at the same time looking really stupid. In other words some of the best comedy plays as a “joke on accident.” The teller never gives away the fact that they know they are manipulating the audience into laughter. This allows the joke to be unique and creative while preserving the audience’s sense of superiority. And hilarity ensues.

I remarked earlier that I laughed often and hard at a vast majority of the movie. Let us pretend for a moment that the makers didn’t fall assbackward into accidentally telling good jokes over and over again. (And at the same time let us also pretend that I am not a bonehead who will laugh at anything). Now that were pretending, perhaps a closer look at ‘Jackass’ is called for. Warning: the following will not be funny.

The most effective thing about ‘Jackass’ (and where it succeeds where so many other action/comedies fail) is the extreme Clarity and Brevity of what is happening on the screen. The pranks and stunts are explained thoroughly and never hang around long enough for the laughs to die down. Plenty of action movies nowadays involve stunts and spectacles that are full of huge special effects but are not effective because they are hard to follow and understand. Other times producers and directors keep in long scenes simply because they spent so much money on them even when they don't work. Here, when a stunt is to be performed a brief title or a sentence of explanation will describe what exactly will happen (Knoxville in roller skates in the path of stampeding Buffalo) and what is at stake (Knoxville’s health, well-being, and dignity). Reveals that develop levels to a particular joke (like the jet plane or the little person fight) come quickly, unexpectedly, but still logically. The fact that it is a documentary keeps everything in suspense. We understand what is about to happen but not how it will turn out. All of this is achieved in merely seconds. And as soon as people are done getting hurt, or saying or doing something funny or off-the-wall, the movie goes straight into something else. No time is wasted. Perhaps the main reason “Jackass” doesn’t have the usual problems of special effects driven action scenes is because the stuntmen getting hurt are in charge of the movie. They want to get the most out of their bruises and that means making it clear how they got them. Incidentally that also makes it funnier.

Because this is a documentary, it would be weird to applaud the acting of “Jackass.” But again another reason why plenty of action/comedies are ineffective is because the acting isn’t realistic. A huge explosion should really freak somebody out but usually doesn’t. Here, the cast gets scared on a regular basis. A good example is when Dave England tries to pin a tail on a real donkey. He gets kicked in the shin, tries again, and actually starts shaking as he inches his way up. The guy is terrified. And when a cast member in “Jackass” gets hurt, they really get hurt. One stunt involved an NFL kicker named Josh Brown kicking a football in the face of Preston Lacy. He kicks the ball and it hits Preston right in the face. Preston then drops to the ground and writhes in very real pain. In this way, “Jackass” is an incredibly cathartic experience. Because the terror and pain is so real, the audience vicariously feels it. Like I said, the entire theater was groaning and gasping the entire time. Now usually this wouldn’t be funny because it is mean to laugh at somebody who just got hurt. But the ingenious thing about Jackass is that it provides a laugh track composed of all the other cast members who aren’t taking part in the stunt. As soon as somebody gets it really good, Johnny Knoxville will lead a hearty group laugh. The fact that every cast member takes their turn laughing at all the other stunts makes it okay for the audience to join in. The guilt we would usually feel is erased by the knowledge that each cast member is complicit in delighting in all the other cast member’s pain. So in a way they deserve it. This is comedic misdirection in the classic sense. A situation that would normally be frightening or scary is made okay by the fact that the stuntman, though injured, is not “seriously” injured, emphasis on the word “seriously.” We have anticipated real terror. Everything has turned out fine. The subsequent relief gives us visceral pleasure causing us to laugh loudly.

Of course, some of the stuff that goes on here really is freak show, disgusting stuff. (There is a running gag that involves a cameraman named Lance throwing up in the midst of several stunt.) I sort of suggest seeing this on DVD and fast-forwarding the parts where it is obvious things will get really bad. I had to cover my eyes during some scenes, like the ‘cup of sweat’ gag. But there is quite a lot to admire here and if I were in charge of an action/comedy I would look to this movie for tips. It is physical comedy at its most effective. Now, imagine if you had an actual story behind some of this stuff. Wouldn't that be powerful indeed. 

The King's Speech (4/5 Stars)

A model of courage

As it is pointed out by King George VI, played by Colin Firth, a modern monarch has no real power. They can’t declare war or raise taxes or write laws. But they are kept on as figureheads because when the king speaks, the people believe that he speaks for them. “But I can’t sp…speak,” he stammers. The King of England has a speech impediment that routinely humiliates him whenever he must make a public speech, which is often. Meanwhile on the other side Europe is Adolf Hitler, the very most of which can be said about him is that he was a very good public speaker.

The Director of this splendid historical drama is none other than Tom Hooper, the man behind the incredible HBO John Adams mini-series (something every American student should be shown in school). Some directors you are thankful exist. Tom Hooper is one of them. He not only tells good stories. He is also keeping alive our heritage and history. And he does it in a way that is engaging and easily accessible. The people in his movies, though royalty, don’t seem to be acting as if they are aware of their place in history. They act like real people in their own time period. They are even given throwaway lines that assert personal fears that we know in our time period they shouldn’t be worried about. For example King George asserts that the English royalty should be worried about being done away with. He names the Czar in Russia and Cousin Wilhelm in Germany as examples. It is a reasonable fear but only at that time and in that place. It takes a writer/director who is unafraid of historical accuracy and has faith in the audience’s sense of empathy to allow his main character to say something obviously wrong. Someone who is aware of the faults of history (not those who say look upon the Founding Fathers or the writers of the Bible as omniscient gods) will smile when certain events and characters are brought up in this movie, their human foibles in full view. (Case in point: We get to meet Neville Chamberlain who talks a little about his misperceptions about Hitler.) We are also presented with another old friend from history books, a Sir Winston Churchill, played by Timothy Spall, always with cigar and drink in hand. This is a great character that surely deserves his own great movie. But that doesn’t mean Tom Hooper is afraid to use him in a supporting role, milling around the background of certain scenes and giving choice quotes from time to time. Hooper gets away with this because he knows enough about the historical period to know when or where he can make Churchill show up and still be accurate. Who knows what anybody actually said? In the end it really doesn’t matter because the audience should know that it is literally impossible to tell a personal story of a historical person and be totally factual. The most any historical biopic can do is get all the details of the period right and make what the characters say and do as plausible as possible through tons of research. This is what Hooper routinely does.

Nobody nowadays can remember this, but King George (or “Bertie” as he was called by his family) wasn’t the big royal story during the 1930s. People were much more interested in his older brother Prince Edward, played by Guy Pearce, and his romance with Wallis Simpson, the woman he would abdicate the throne for in order to marry. Now that was a huge thing. Sometimes though it takes 80 years to realize who was indeed the more interesting person. Edward is the perfect foil for Bertie. He is selfish, uninterested in his duty, and oblivious to the great need of his people for a strong leader in dire times. On first blush it may not seem obvious why King George is a courageous person for giving wartime speeches to the nation while fighting a stammer. But this movie makes clear that he really didn’t have to do it. He could have been like his brother. He could have abdicated the throne. He could have refused to make the speeches. He could have simply not cared. I can only imagine what the people of England felt when they heard those wartime speeches knowing full well that all the pauses were mainly due to the king’s herculean effort to get the words out straight and true. It must be hard for a king, with all his wealth and prestige, to show solidarity with a suffering people. Standing in front of a national audience doing the thing you hate and fear the most is perhaps as close as a monarch can get.

A cynical person would look upon Colin Firth’s performance as “Oscar Bait.” And they would be right. There is nothing the Academy likes better than physical impediments, except of course royalty. This role has both. But that doesn’t mean Firth is undeserving. He really gets the whole thing down perfectly, (and I learned quite a lot about speech impediments in the meantime.) Most of the movie takes place in the office of the speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played cheerfully by Geoffrey Rush. He is an unconventional therapist who insists that he and the king be on a first name basis and that the therapy shouldn’t simply be mechanical. This is awkward because one of them is royalty. But really there is no choice. Bertie has already been to every other speech therapist. Joining them several times or waiting out in the lobby drinking tea is the Queen, played by that woman of unique beauty Helena Bonham Carter. She does a good job too. They all do a good job.

p.s. This movie is Rated R. It should be rated G. The reason it is R is because Bertie doesn’t stammer when he curses and under doctor’s orders he is told that when he feels his mouth clogging, he should curse as loud as he can. (Only in the privacy of the office of course.) So there is one scene where he shouts, “Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, shit, bugger, Fuck!” And that is why the movie is R. If there is any movie that makes certain the idiocy of an objective rating system it is, “The King’s Speech,” a noble story about perseverance and duty, which I would argue is fit even for kindergartners.  As a student of law I understand the point of an objective system. It is only fair to put movie-makers on notice as to what exactly constitutes an “R” rating. Two “Fucks” is an R. Everybody knows that. But this standard ignores the most important thing that parents should be considering and that is the context of the story and more importantly whether the movie is any good. These are matters of taste and though any freedom of speech loving person would be aghast at the idea of somebody rating something via such a judgmental prism as “good taste,” I would argue that if the rating system doesn’t consider taste than it is completely pointless and we shouldn’t have it at all. The way it is now, we make no distinction over how the objectionable content is shown or told. Thus, the blood and gore of responsible redemptive movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” or “The Passion of the Christ,” is equal to the most disgusting sadistic torture porn like “Saw I-VII." Nor does an objective standard actually prohibit objectionable content from creeping in anyways. Many comedies make it a mission to find a way to say the naughty things they want to say without actually saying it. Just take a look at the movie “Little Fockers.” The title is a joke and the punch line is “Fuck.” But the movie is PG-13 even though it couldn’t be more obvious. Besides the movie is terrible. Why are we telling parents that this is better than, “The King’s Speech”?

I Love You, Phillip Morris (4/5 Stars)

A beautiful lie.

Mozart’s K. 492: No.20 Duet: Sull’aria from The Marriage of Figaro holds a special place in prison movies. You may remember it from ‘The Shawshank Redemption.’ It’s the song that Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) subversively played on the prison PA system, which pissed the warden off some and landed him in solitary for a month. Red (Morgan Freeman) commented in his voiceover that he hadn’t the slightest idea what the Italian women were singing about but liked to think it was something too beautiful to express in words. It is a very beautiful song. One of the most sublime pieces of music Mozart ever composed. It also happens to be a lie. In the Opera, the two women are writing a trick letter in which one of them pretends to profess love in order to set a trap that will catch the other’s philandering husband in the act of adultery. The song is played in its entirety at the end of “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” a love story about a compulsive liar and scam artist Steven Russell (played by Jim Carrey) and the man he “falls in love with” during a stint in prison, Phillip Morris (played by Ewan McGregor). I put that in quotes because it is impossible to tell whether Steven Russell means it. He has no code, no honor, and no qualms about looking somebody straight in the eye and lying about the most ridiculous things. But he also does incredibly romantic things. Things that you would think only a person crazy in love or simply crazy would do. So I don’t know, maybe Red had the right idea when he never tried to translate the words to that Aria.

Steven Russell apparently is a real person who right now is in a Texas penitentiary serving a 144-year sentence in solitary confinement. It’s an unprecedented sentence for a nonviolent offender. How one gets such a sentence is a pretty unbelievable story. It’s best to start at the beginning. When Steven was eleven his parents revealed to him that they weren’t his parents. Steven was adopted. (It was a very weird case of adoption. Steven was a middle child. His real parents kept the first and third kid.) Right about that time, Steven also realized he was gay. But he didn’t let anyone know because he lived in Texas. He married a very Christian woman (Leslie Mann), became a police officer, and did such kinda-gay-but-not-if-your-a-Christian things as enthusiastically play the church organ at Sunday Mass. On the side he had numerous illicit and secret affairs with other “not gay” Texan men. Then one day as he was driving home a truck blindsided him, totaling his car and nearly killing him. As the paramedics carted him away, he loudly vowed that he was going to live life the way he wanted from now on. “I’m going to be a faggot!” he declared, “I’m going to really fag it up!” At the hospital he promptly tells his stunned wife that he’s gay and divorces her.

That’s when the stealing starts. Steven Russell moves to Florida in order to realize his dream of being the most stereotypical gay man ever. Flashy cars, clothes, boyfriends. He does it all. Money is no object and none of it is his. He’s stealing from his company, purposely slipping-and-falling in grocery stores, taking nose dives down escalators and suing businesses for his pain and suffering. He gets caught and is arrested. His wife shows up and asks his current boyfriend, “The gay thing and stealing, are they connected?” She is rightly treated to a disdainful response, but I will surmise that they are, at least in the sense that being forced to lie your entire life about something so essential to your identity could probably aid your ability to lie in general or simply be enough to convince a person that God, Family, and Country are bullshit and life should be lived accordingly. Throw in an uncanny ability to survive fatal car wrecks and several suicide attempts, and you can see start to see how a person as brash and reckless as Steven Russell might be possible.

There are some roles that only Jim Carrey can play and this is one of them. Jim Carrey isn’t how you say, a “natural” performer. He’s very much an Act. So is Steven Russell. The nerve of the guy is incredible. He escapes from prison not once but several times. A couple times the first thing he does outside is to buy a suit, go right back to the prison, and impersonate the lawyer of Phillip Morris in an attempt to bust him out of jail as well. (It works at least once.) Other things he does: Lie his way into being hired as the CFO of a corporation and stealing millions, Practicing law without a license, selling bad tomatoes, insurance fraud, credit card fraud, fake tans etc. etc. etc. He also keeps getting caught. Over and over again. At some point the ordinary person would get a hint and cut their losses. But Steven Russell isn’t normal. His Plan B when lying doesn’t work is to commit suicide. He does that several times. Waking up in a hospital not dead becomes a running joke in the movie. This really happened.

And then there’s the love story, which the movie treats as real and sincere, as it might have been although there really is no way to tell. Russell falls in love at first sight when he sees Morris in the prison library. Soon he is sneaking letters and chocolates to Morris (who is diabetic but its the thought that counts) via the prison smuggling system and finally he cons his way into actually getting transferred into Phillip’s cell. There’s a screecher down the hall who likes to yell all night long. Steven pays to have him beat up. Phillip remarks that it is “the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.” Happy Days ensue inside and then outside the prison where Russell's subsequent cons are largely perpetrated for the "purpose" of providing Phillip with an extravagant lifestyle. Phillip is largely ignorant of where the money is coming from because Russell lies to him about that too. Most of the humor in the story is situational. The Writer-Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are the same writing team behind the BillyBob Thornton movie “Bad Santa” (and, inexplicably, the kid’s movie, “Cats & Dogs.”) Taboo subjects and people behaving badly are not avoided but mined for laughs and cringes. For example it is clearly explained to a new prisoner that to get anything in prison you have to pay for it or you can suck a dick. Nobody in this movie treats this conversation as anything but normal. There is also a scene of loud gay sex, just in case you were wondering. 

If none of the above bothers you, this movie could be quite enjoyable. The story is pretty amazing just in itself. The best parts are the various ways Russell manages to escape from prison. I won’t give away exactly how he does this suffice to say that it takes quite a lot of balls and just as much brilliance. There is a main drawback to this movie though and that is Russell himself. You can’t take the love story seriously because the guy is so unreal. Plenty of the scenes feel strangely empty when it is clear the makers want all those gushy romantic feelings to take over. Or maybe that’s just me being a heterosexual.