Love the Hard Way

This is a must for every Adrien Brody fan out there. Despite the dismal reviews this little known movie received, this movie is a true gem. Set in New York, Adrien plays Jack, a streetsmart con man who with his partner,Charlie, played by John Seda, rip off foreign businessman. Their actress friends pretend to be hookers, and seduce the businessmen, then Jack and Charlie break in dressed as policemen and make a fake arrest. In private, Jack is hard at work writing a novel, and frequently visits a run down movie theater where he meets Claire, played by Charlotte Ayanna. Claire is a "good girl" graduate student who eagerly ignores warnings not to date Jack. Jack is drawn to her innocence, while she is drawn to his charms and cleverness. Their first date begins with a pleasent little dinner and ends with a night of steamy sex in Jack's bed. From here the relationship becomes doomed. As the police slowly close in on Jack and Charlie, Jack does everything possible to end the relationship with Claire, it is at this point that they both begin to self-distruct. Their self-distruction leads them down a path that becomes a serious dose of reality for Claire and Jack. It's a story of love, jealousy, sex, betrayal, crime, suicide, it's a realistic love story and a lesson of everything that should not happen in a relationship.

Adrien Brody is outstanding in this one, and Charlotte Ayanna is also good. This is truely one of Adrien's best.

I'll believe that someone can get bit by a special poisonous spider and gain super powers before I'll believe that someone that looks like Charlotte Ayanna (and supposedly is a science student) would have ANYTHING to do with someone who looks and acts like Brody's character or would start to turn tricks for less than $10,000 per night. The acting is OK, and it is shot well, but the premise is a bit far-fetched. Brody isn't physically imposing enough to carry the role, and Ayanna is FAR too good looking. She would be at Columbia a month before she hooked up with the NYC jet set and, as for him...I mean...who does he intimidate acting like a thug? He's about 140 pounds soaking wet holding a brick...looks convincing as a starving war refugee, not as a tough-guy. Would have been better if Seda and Brody had switched roles. Pam Grier seems to just be going through the motions. The story is interesting, aside from the miscasting, but thoroughly unbelievable. Rent Mean Streets or Pope of Greenwich Village if you want a slice of the New York underworld that's a bit more palatable and easier to stomach.

It's fun to watch the now famous Adrien Brody interact with the warm and pretty Charlotte Ayanna, the great Jon Seda of Homicide, and that Tarantino-revived 70's icon Pam Grier. Love the Hard Way has a more than decent cast that works well together: Brody has good chemistry with both Ayanna and Seda, and the New York of the movie has good chemistry too: it's real and beautiful without being obtrusive. The German director and the French cinematographer may be why the town has such a fresh look in this movie.

The clothes, however, are obtrusively bad -- it's lucky Brody has a model's body and Seda is hunky, or those duds would make us laugh them off the screen.

The German director's adaptation of a Chinese novel translated to New York may be a bit secondhand. Nonetheless it's not uninteresting to have a pimp/extortionist who's also a budding writer: the film and the actor are intelligent enough to make us entertain the possibility of the two people in one body.

But despite various points of interest, none of it quite works.

I wasn't convinced that any of this stuff was real--the emotional collapse of the petty criminal, the descent into prostitution of the brilliant med student, or their miraculous coming together two years later after prison and a botched suicide.

The trouble with the attempt to establish a hard-edged milieu is that what Brody and Seda's characters are doing doesn't seem ugly enough: the bedroom scams are too pat, and too independent of the outside big city world of crime. The big bachelor pad isn't mean and sleazy enough either; nothing is: I can't quite believe in Brody as a bad guy. The early scenes where Brody and Ayanna are wooing each other start him off not looking hard at all; in fact he just seems like a nice cocky young Jewish boy who's full of himself and bursting with joie de vivre. He could easily be a college student just playing tough and low-life to seem sexy to a studious, well brought up girl. His pimp clothes and pimp manner don't fit him right and just seem put on to strike a pose.

You keep watching your DVD for the acting job Brody, Ayalla and Seda do. As in 21 Grams, they manage to produce many powerful emotional moments even if it doesn't all meld together into a story. The incoherence is signaled by the confused ending. This is a bit more than merely an obscure footnote to The Pianist, but only just.

I don't understand why this movie has been so reviled by critics and IMDb users. The obsession and descent into darkness of the nice girl Claire, depicted by Charlotte Ayanna without any annoying mannerisms, are so realistic they made me ache. Stories like hers are very common, although not everybody goes to such extremes. Adrien Brody is an excellent actor and gives an interesting performance, but I find him miscast: he doesn't really exude a life of crime out of every pore. The script doesn't actually explain how Jack Grace became the way he is. The sketchy details about his background he provides Claire could be a figment of his overactive imagination. So all we can do is watch Claire sink lower and lower, but eventually redeem herself. And is Jack 'cured' after two year in jail and a close call? Probably not.

This well-acted, twisted, bittersweet story was a pleasant surprise. After admiring Adrien Brody's haunted portrayal of the pianist trapped in Nazi Germany, I wondered if he could really be that good of an actor, maybe it was just the genius of Polanski's direction. This role proved his talent is real for me. It is a contemporary tale about a hustler who secretly longs to be an author who becomes attracted to a comely coed who is studying to become a scientist. They couldn't be more different, yet they form a connection that changes their lives forever. The actress who plays Claire has beautiful sky-blue eyes and a nubile body as brilliant as her mind. Jack is not prepared for a woman like her. His friends are his partners in crime but he is the boss, he has all the answers, until he meets his match in a vice detective played by the always great Pam Grier. What will the future hold for him? Rent this movie and see. You won't be sorry.