Phoenix: A Última Cartada

I was expecting straight-to-video fodder here the kind you watch stupefied because it happened to be on late at night. It revealed itself to be a taut little thing that tries to create its own world.

It was caught in the Tarantino craze so we have small talk about cartoons, movies and music peppered throughout. It has, eventually, a heist in animal masks gone awry that makes poor sense and cookie cutter resolutions where we drive around to settle scores with a bunch of characters that were left hanging so that it's all neat by the end.

For a while it manages to strike some spark, most of it in the first half.

A man who we understand is trying to be upstanding while everyone around him is fickle, but he has a blind spot for gambling. It's not about the money, for him it seems to be a warped way of measuring himself up against the universe, challenging the fates to pave whatever way they have in store so he can have a mandate to abide by. He makes a mess, owing everyone in town, but won't take the easy way out because a bet is a bet; opportunity for self-worth.

So when the fates shuffle the deck and he's dealt the role of hapless stooge who loses everything, he goes through it with stoic persistence to settle debts. Ray Liotta is as good as he was for Scorsese in a similar twitchy role as fates conspire to crush him.

It's no Asphalt Jungle where the heist is the ritual that opens us from anxiety to dreamlike visions, but it beats Reservoir Dogs.

Noir Meter: 2/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Neo

Did you ever see one of those awful action thrillers or crime dramas (where, as Jon Stewart once pointed out, "all the action takes place in a strip club"), usually starring Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts, Rutger Hauer, Michael Madsen, or some refugee from the Brat Pack, on late night cable? Well, "Phoenix" is the "Chinatown" of those movies. Which, in case you miss my meaning, means it's really quite good.

This is a supremely fun film if you like (or hate but have seen) any of these B action flicks. It should be used in film schools when teaching this overlooked genre ("Contemporary exploitation films," they'd probably call them.). This movie has a loan shark, a bookie, crooked cops, bagmen, a strip joint that figures prominently in the plot, a sultry siren in bed with everybody, a cleverly masked heist, a lucky fill-in-the-blank item, a burned out beauty with a sexy jailbait daughter, and a hero with a chance at redemption, if only he can keep from screwing everything up. This movie's got everything, and that's the point.

Ray Liotta stars (in, for my money, the best performance of his career) and, although one of the aforementioned crooked cops, has an incorruptible sense of honor. For example, he has accumulated a substantial gambling debt, but won't let anyone else pay it off or make it go away because he refuses to "welsh." It's a piece of advice given to him by his late gambler father, you'll probably not be surprised to learn.

The plot is, to pay off the sizable debt, Liotta and three of his fellow crooked cops mastermind a heist in a strip club where everything goes wrong while they wear funny animal masks. "But," as I often tell people, "it's not like it sounds."

If you're still not convinced, the fact that Anjelica Huston is a part of this film's great cast should tell you something. Also, watch out for the amazing Tom Noonan as a lisping bookie and a scene with Giovanni Ribisi where you can see the conclusion coming but is still satisfying even if you've already figured it out because of Liotta's intense performance.

3 out of 4 stars on the fun scale. (Probably less on the quality scale.)

There was no shortage of 'cool' crime thrillers released on the success of Goodfellas in the nineties, and while I wouldn't say that this is one of the very best of them; it's certainly one of the better ones. Phoenix benefits from Scorsese's leading man Ray Liotta, who takes the lead role in this film as a gambling addicted copper. The plot focuses on crime as you would expect, but the gambling side of the plot is what really makes and sets it apart from most of the other nineties crime flicks. Ray Liotta is Harry Collins, a cop with a gambling addiction; and, like most gamblers, a money problem resulting from it. He owes money he doesn't have to his bookie, a man who calls himself "Chicago", and after being given a few days to pay; he soon realises that he's going to have to take steps to raise the money. This prompts him to set up a plan with his fellow coppers Mike, James and Fred to rip off local pimp and all round bad guy Louie. Naturally, the plan goes tits up and pretty soon all four of them are forced to pay the consequences...

The film is never really brilliant (though in fairness, this sort of film doesn't usually turn me on all that much), but it manages to keep a fairly good pace going throughout and doesn't get boring. Ray Liotta has played this sort of role many times before and since, and as you would expect he is well at home with the leading role in this film. British director Danny Cannon (also director of rubbish such as Judge Dredd and I Know What You Did Last Summer) has recruited a decent cast of below a-list stars, which includes Anthony LaPaglia, Daniel Baldwin, Jeremy Piven and Xander Berkeley, as well as one of my favourite B-movie actresses, Kari Wuhrer. Anjelica Huston also appears, but is horribly miscast as Liotta's love interest. There's plenty of what most people will have come to expect from modern crime flicks; we have car chases, shootouts, sharp dialogue and all the rest of it. I'd have preferred the film if we'd have got a bit more of the gambling theme thrown in, but that's not too important as overall, this is a more than passable effort and I'm sure crime fans will enjoy it.

This is one of those films that somehow falls under the radar and languishes undeservedly in obscurity. In a fairly convoluted plot, Ray Liotta plays an honest cop with a gambling addiction who comes up with a plan to rob a loan shark in order to pay off his debts. He enlists the aid of three of his colleagues (Daniel Baldwin, Jeremy Piven and the unappreciated Anthony LaPaglia, who gives a film-stealing performance here) unaware that one is sleeping with another's wife and is under investigation.

Although the story unfolds a little too slowly at times, writer Eddie Richey's script has a lot of depth, lending some diversity to a bunch of what could otherwise have been genre-stereotypical tough guys. The quality of the writing is high, with some off-the-wall dialogue and unique insight into such diverse subjects as King Kong, Three-on-a-match, Looney Tunes cartoons, and Dostoyevsky's gambling addiction. Brit director Danny Cannon creates some arresting images (an alternately sun-scorched and rain-sodden Phoenix in monsoon season) and manages to create loads of atmosphere despite often selecting extreme close-ups to emphasise the thoughts and emotions of the characters. There are no weak performances but, together with LaPaglia, the ever-dependable Ray Liotta stands out in the lead role.

The ending is probably weaker than it should be because it takes a little too long for all the strands to be neatly tied, but this is still an impressive piece of entertainment that deserves to be better known.

Once in a while you come along a movie that, even though it is already several years old, you have never heard of before. "Phoenix" is such a movie. The only reason why I gave it a try and taped it is because there is a famous actor in it who I usually like to see playing (Ray Liotta) and because I hoped that the story might be something nice (most of the time I like crime movies). And because I really didn't know what to expect from it, it's only good that I didn't see that cover photo first. That ugly thing doesn't really give a good impression of what this movie is like. When watching that picture, my first impression is that this will be a typical action flick, Stalone or Jean-Claude Vandamme style, while in reality that certainly isn't the case.

"Phoenix" tells the story of Harry Collins, a cop whose life isn't exactly going all too well. He's a hopeless gambler who only loses a lot of money and never wins anything. But that's not how he sees it. He considers gambling not as something to make money with, he sees it as as an honorable tradition which he has inherited from his father. He gambles on anything he can possibly think of and he really sees a hidden tip in everything: the name of a girl, a conversation with some people who he considers to be lucky... Pretty soon he has a lot of debts with a loan shark named 'Chicago', which he can't possibly pay. When his colleagues suggest that they could arrest or even kill the man, he is shocked. There is no honor in doing such a thing, but from one thing comes another and soon Collins and his colleagues find themselves in a downward spiral of corruption, deceit, murder...

A movie with Ray Liotta in it is always worth watching, no doubt about that. Even a movie that isn't that good can be saved by his appearance. But this movie didn't need to be saved at all. This was actually a very nice film with some well-developed characters and a nice storyline. I might even say that this entire movie was a big surprise to me, as it kept my attention from the first moment until the last. And not only Ray Liotta is worth mentioning. Anthony LaPaglia, Daniel Baldwin, Jeremy Piven,... all did a very nice job in this movie. Still, in the end I'm not surprised why so little people know this movie. OK, it has a cast with some famous people in it like Anjelica Huston, Jeremy Piven and Ray Liotta, but this is also the work of the same director who gave us movies like "Judge Dredd" and "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer". I'm really wondering what made that man decide to do this project in the first place and where he ever found so much excellent inspiration. Anyway, there is one thing that I'm absolutely sure of: I will definitely recommend it to everybody who wants to hear it. I give this movie at least a 7.5/10.