Crossing Guard

I guess I've been on a bit of a Jack Nicholson trip lately. I suddenly realised every movie I had seen him in I liked. On that basis, this little flick caught my eye in last week's teleguide.

But Jack can't save it. This movie is weak. The message is important, but Penn uses so many devices around such thin material that the whole thing seems artifically manufactured to generate a moral response. I always hate movies that try to tell you what to think, and this movie is a railway track for the mind.

The characters are wrong. They react wrongly. And the ending is the height of wrongness. I can't believe I kept watching for that- it lost me after half-an-hour.

I puzzle at those reviewers criticizing this film, which to my mind is a tour de force. Of course, I do volunteer work with dying folks and help train aspiring grief counselors to deal with the traumas that life all too often brings us. I can only assume that those who so quickly dismiss this powerful meditation on grief and remorse have yet to experience these real life emotions. Something by Schwarzenegger may be more to their taste, or one of the ubiquitous comic book recreations we encounter most summers with cardboard characters and pseudo emotions.

Sean Penn is plumbing much deeper regions of the human psyche, and doing so with actors of rare talent, fully capable of sharing with us their heart rending vulnerabilities. Few actors have the courage to go to the places these actors visit as they face suffering almost too great to bear. I'm reminded of the more recent Mystic River for which Sean Penn received an Academy award for best actor, a movie that explores equally traumatizing events. It was heartening to watch the joy with which this award was greeted by his fellow professionals who have long acknowledged this man's genius both in front of and behind the camera. This movie deserves a much wider audience of discriminating movie viewers.

This movie about a man revenge story. For six agonizing years, Freddy Gale(Jack) has waited for John Booth (David Morse), The man jailed for a crime that smashed Freddy's life. Now, Booth is out of prison and Freddy's giving him three days before he returns to even the score !

It was a good film. Sean Penn did a great movie since dead man walking ! I cannot take my eyes off Jack Nicholson !David Morse (The Rock , The good son & The Green mile) is a very underrated actor. I shall recommend this for everyone who is a fan of Jack Nicholson. At least watch it once :-)

Sean Penn directs Jack Nicholson in this story of a man who swears to avenge his daughter's death by killing the drunk driver who struck her.

The movie opens up with Nicholson's character being a sleazy guy in a strip club and instantly we don't care very much about him, because he treats everyone like crap and doesn't really seem to have much depth. I'm all for unlikeable characters, but not when they're totally unredeemable and of no interest to the audience.

The rest of the plot seems very back-and-forth..."I'm going to kill him!" "Wait, I can't kill him." "I'm going to kill him!" "But I shouldn't kill him." When he finally makes up his mind the movie has already lost a lot of its momentum and derails way too early.

David Morse was excellent in the movie. Whenever he's on screen, the movie is worth watching. Jack Nicholson is his usual competent crazy guy. The subject makes the movie a Serious Topic movie, but it often has trouble staying on topic.

The movie itself is mostly very slow going, aside from Morse's scenes and the scene where Nicholson talks to his ex-wife about a dream. How many times do we need to see Nicholson's character hanging out at the strip club? Yes, we get the idea, he's turned into a sleazebag with no direction in his life.

The ending is what really saves the movie. Beyond that, no spoilers from me. Once you get the idea of how Nicholson acts in the strip club, you might as well fast-forward through the strip club scenes (unless you want to see the strippers do their thing), because they're all pretty much the same. Still, that ending is just so good the movie ends up feeling pretty decent.