Repo Men

Starring: Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Alice Braga
Directed by: Miguel Sapochnik (debut)
Written by: Eric Garcia (debut) and Garrett Lerner (debut)

While the premise for the sci-fi thriller “Repo Men” is an interesting one, first-time director Miguel Sapochnik and first-time screenwriters Eric Garcia and Garret Lerner lose all enthusiasm once the set-up is complete. What occurs after that is unfortunate as the narrative careens into awkward tonal changes, misguided storytelling, and scenes of ultra violence utilized to kick-start the moments of banality.

In the dystopian “Repo Men,” people in need of a transplant for an organ or other body part no long have to wait years to reach the top of a donor list. For a small fortune, patients can finance anything from an artificial lung to a pair of eyes or ears. Need a new liver? Five hundred thousand dollars should cover it.

Headed by an organization known as the Union, signing on the dotted line and going under the knife to survive is easy for people desperate enough and willing to go into major debt. It’s just a matter of time, however, when a bill goes unpaid and the Union sends out repo men to reclaim what patients can no longer afford.

Jude Law and Forest Whitaker play Remy and Jake, two longtime friends who are the best repo men in the company. Slick with their scalpels, Remy and Jake can slide into a high-tense situation and get things done without much commotion. While both love their jobs, Remy is seriously thinking about joining the sales team so he can spend more time with his family. Plans change after he is injured during a mission and wakes up in a hospital in need of a heart transplant himself.

After the operation, Remy grows a conscience and can no longer do the job he once enjoyed. To make matters worse, he has fallen behind on payments, which prompts Union leader Frank (Liev Schreiber) to send Jake out to play surgeon with his friend. Why the Union can’t make an exception for Remy especially since he is the top repo man they have is beyond comprehension, but there are far too many oversights to just wag your finger at just one.

At this point, Jake has teamed up with Beth (Alice Braga), a woman whose entire body has basically been reconstructed with artificial parts. During their love scene, you’ll scoff as Remy passionately kisses her while trying to piece her back together. While the film is going for dark and twisted like “Crash” (not the overrated 2004 movie about racism in L.A., but director David Cronenberg’s 1996 trippy one about people who find car crashes sexually stimulating), it comes off as laughable instead.

Full of nonsensical ideas and plot holes that will only be ignored by audiences looking for cheap action thrills ripped off from movies like “Old Boy,” “Repo Men” doesn’t have much to fall back on once the blood dries up.

Our Family Wedding

Starring: America Ferrera, Forest Whitaker, Carlos Mencia
Directed by: Rick Famuyiwa (“Brown Sugar”)
Written by: Wayne Conley (“King’s Ransom”), Malcolm Spellman (debut), Rick Famuyiwa (“Brown Sugar”)

Movies featuring racially diverse casts and themes are hard to come by these days (unless you’re rubbing elbows with the overrated brand name known as Tyler Perry). But if future projects aimed at underrepresented minorities are anything like the grating “Our Family Wedding,” studios should keep them tucked away at least until George Lopez’s dubious “Speedy Gonzalez” idea comes to fruition.

Not only are the distasteful stereotypes what make “Wedding” a chore to sit through, director and co-writer Rick Famuyiwa (“Brown Sugar”) just doesn’t have the comedic chops to deliver entertaining material for an entire feature film. While a goat hopped up on Viagra is the unfunny low point of the movie, “Wedding” sinks close to that level before and after the farm animal starts dry-humping Forest Whitaker in the bathroom.

Using the same structure as 2005’s “Guess Who” (a less than stellar remake of the Oscar winning 1967 film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”), the film follows two families as they prepare for a big wedding celebration for their son and daughter.

Lucia Ramirez (America Ferrera) and Marcus Boyd (Lance Gross) may be in love, but that doesn’t mean their dads have to like each other. The animosity between father of the bride Miguel (Carlos Mencia) and father of the groom Marcus (Whitaker) begins when Miguel, the owner of an auto repair shop, impounds Marcus’s sports car and exchanges verbal jabs with his daughter’s future father-in-law even before he knows who he is.

The set up is a tired one. Most of the jokes play the race card without remorse and each one is less amusing than the last. When Lucia and Marcus break the news to their families about their interracial relationship, no one bothers to tell Lucia’s grandmother (Lupe Ontiveros) who falls over when she sees a black man walk into her kitchen. The racial profiling continues as Miguel calls Marcus “bro’” and Marcus retorts with “hombre.” The families bicker and clash about wedding traditions, culture, and religion while Lucia and Marcus stand idly by having claimed a nonsensical mantra to help them get through the weeks before the big day: “Our marriage, their wedding.”

Directed gracelessly by Famuyiwa, “Our Family Wedding” is an unfortunate mess of a movie that skips all the tender moments and authentic family ordeals for dull slapstick comedy and ham-fisted put-downs. If you’re looking for something as endearing as “Father of the Bride,” you’ve come to the wrong ceremony.

Forest Whitaker belts out Dick in a Box

While I may loathe the MTV Movie Awards as an actual awards show, I do love watching actors do things we normally wouldn’t see them do. Sacha Baron Cohen may have shocked audiences when he shoved his bare ass in Eminem’s face at last night’s show (the rapper was pissed!), and Andy Samberg’s “Dracula”/”Teen Wolf”/”Twilight” fake trailer was hilarious, but we expect things like that from those comedians. See Samberg below:

What no one expected, however, was Oscar winner Forest Whitaker (”The Last King of Scotland”) coming out to sing “Dick in a Box,” which was first popularized by one of Samberg “Saturday Night Live” digital shorts that he performed with Justin Timberlake. Since Daniel Day-Lewis’s next film is Rob Marshall’s “Nine,” I dare the two-time Oscar winner to come out and perform Samberg’s “Jizz in My Pants” to promote the musical.

See the performance at the 1:32 mark below.

Street Kings

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie
Directed by: David Ayer (“Harsh Times”)
Written by: James Ellroy (“L.A. Confidential”), Kurt Wimmer (“Ultraviolet”), Jaime Moss (debut)

If the name David Ayer is anywhere in a film’s credits, it would probably be safe to say the theme of the movie is going to revolve around corrupt cops. In his new film “Street Kings,” the director hands over the writing responsibilities (even after he did such a great job with 2005’s “Harsh Times”) to a trio of screenwriters who fail to understand the meaning of multilayered characters.

In the last seven years as a writer, Ayer has given us “Training Day,” “Dark Blue,” “S.W.A.T.” and “Harsh Times,” the last of which he was credited as both a screenwriter and first-time director. Now, in his sophomore film, Ayer’s lands some solid punches with the boys in blue, but doesn’t give us enough depth from the main and supporting characters. In “Training Day,” he transformed Denzel Washington into a crooked LAPD detective, a role which landed him his second Academy Award of his career. He also gave us an incredibly unique character study with Christian Bale as an ex-Ranger turned police officer in “Harsh Times,” one of the most overlooked performances of that year.

In “Street Kings,” the story follows LAPD vice detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves, who has come along way in the acting department since hamming it up most of his career), a trigger-happy cop whose on the right side of the law, but likes to do his job more like a renegade instead of a police officer. Think Russell Crowe’s Bud White in “L.A. Confidential,” which was also written by James Ellroy. Basically, he’s the jury, judge, and executioner.

When Tom uses his brute techniques to wipe out a couple of Korean kidnappers, he is thrust into the L.A. limelight as a heroic cop moving up in the ranks. Although his commanding officer Capt. Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker) likes the way he does his job, others, like Tom’s former partner Terrance Washington (Terry Crews), let internal affairs know there’s a guy on the force that isn’t exactly on the up and up. Now internal affairs officer Capt. James Biggs (Hugh Laurie) is watching Tom’s every move, which, of course, makes Tom want to confront his ex-partner for ratting him out.

During the confrontation, which takes place in a local convenient store, Tom and Terrance find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time as they are ambushed by two masked gunmen who fill Officer Washington’s body with machine-gun ammo before Tom even knows what’s happening. But with the history between the two officers, Tom isn’t in the most ideal place, especially with Capt. Biggs asking questions.

Capt. Wander and the rest of the department, however, quickly step in to clean up the mess. “We can’t afford to lose you,” Wander tells Tom. “You’re the tip of the spear. Who’s going to hold back the animals?” Thus, corruption begets corruption and so on as Tom attempts to steer clear of Capt. Biggs and search for Terrance’s killers.

Unintentionally funny at times, “Street Kings” is a complex story with unrefined characters. With an entire cast basically playing bad or dishonest cops, there’s no real sense of conflict even between the cops and the thugs in the ghetto. And what fun can be had when everyone is on the same team? Even with semiautomatics, the story sputters in the film’s final anticlimactic act and quickly turns from complex to comical.

Vantage Point

Starring: Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker
Directed by: Pete Travis (debut)
Written by: Barry Levy (debut)

Car salesmen. Reality TV show producers. Toothbrush designers. These are some of the only people that can get away with having a gimmick run their livelihood. Unfortunately, for their first time out of the gate, director Pete Travis and screenwriter Barry Levy throw all their energy into technique and forget about fundamentals.

Just in time for more presidential primaries, “Vantage Point” follows the attempted assassination of the U.S. President (William Hurt) during an international counter-terrorist assembly in Spain. Although it might seem like a full-length feature in theory, “Vantage Point” is actually about a 15-minute film told from the point of view of five separate people.

One of these characters is Thomas Barnes (Quaid), a Secret Service agent recently back on duty after taking a bullet for the President only six months prior. As cliché as cliché gets, Tom blames himself for the attempted murder of the Commander in Chief and questions whether or not he is ready to return to the line of duty (Quaid’s shifty eyes do most of the talking at this point).

Then there’s Howard Lewis (Whitaker), a bystander at the political gathering who is videotaping everything as the events unfold. But not even the all-powerful digital camera can catch all that is happening in this grassy-knoll-of-a-script. Secondary storylines weigh in on the conventional plot but become blurred as Levy repeats the scenario by rewinding to the beginning. It’s not clever, has been done before and in a much viewer-friendly way, and bets everything on a payoff that turns out to be a yawner.

An insane amount of time is wasted introducing us to would-be assassins when the actual assassination becomes insignificant midway through. As the web of characters gets thicker, it’s harder to feel any sense of mystery or how tense these individuals should actually be. Instead, the film is sliced and diced into an unrecognizable mess and then somehow devolves into a panicky car chase lead by an indestructible Quaid (who would have known the guy can Tokyo drift?)

Although the interweaving tricks may bring you to think of such films as “Run Lola Run” (a film that does it right) or “Timecode” (a film that does it wrong), “Vantage Point” is stale entertainment any which way you cut it. Trying to piece the thing together is like working on a puzzle where the finished product is a picture of a cloudy sky. It’ll get done sooner or later, but how dull is getting there and the outcome?