ROB MCEWAN
Ice Cube stares down his cute cargo (Philip Bolden) in Are We There Yet?
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Are We There Yet?
Opens Fri., Jan. 21, at Meridian and others
Beginning the film with a talking bobble-head doll of Satchel Paige on the dashboard of Ice Cube's pimped-out SUV is the first of many reasons why this annoying carload should've been run off the road. When Nick (Cube), owner of a sports collectible store and self-proclaimed child loather, falls for a divorced "breeder" with two brats, he realizes that in order to get to Suzanne (the lovely Nia Long), he first has to charm her children. His opportunity comes when he offers to escort the kids from Portland, Ore., to a New Year's bash that their mother is throwing in Vancouver, B.C. As soon as the road trip begins in Cube's new Navigator, the 11-year-old diva and her asthmatic 8-year-old brother are ruining his leather interior with body fluids, spraying juice on the ceiling, and listening to Clay Aiken records. The slapstick continues with Cube chasing a moving train on a galloping horse, fighting various forest mammals, and causing the explosive demise of his beloved Navigator.
In the end, of course, the importance of family is recognized, and our hero realizes how everything else pales in comparison—even if the kids are the spawn of Satan. Cube has enough talent and charisma to star in far meatier flicks, while Long's performance consists of high squeaky laughs, tender thank-yous, and heartwarming tears that endlessly fill her eyes. My eyes remaining quite dry, I'm convinced Cube should've ditched the children on the side of the road at the first sign of bladder-control issues, then run off with the illustrious Nichelle Nichols, who plays the kids' pervy nanny. (PG) HEATHER LOGUE
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Opens Fri., Jan. 21, at Meridian and Metro
A blip on the harried cultural radar of 1974—when Watergate, hemorrhaging 'Nam fallout, European upheavals, and endless Cold War negotiations clogged the media pipeline—the sad tale of Samuel Byck was all but subsumed. A jobless high-school dropout, failed family man, and all-around discombobulated misfit, he attempted, ludicrously, to hijack an airliner in order to fly it into the White House and eliminate the source of his and the nation's festering problems.
Perhaps it's inevitable that Byck—his name jiggered as Bicke for Niels Mueller's moody, pretentious, but potent debut—would be remembered now, after the similar 9/11 plot. Mueller's film can never quite get into the addled head of Bicke (Sean Penn), but its telescope stare is relentless. The central gauntlet of this superfreak's life is a sales job at a Pittsburgh office-supply store captained by a steak-and-whiskey bull-goose pitchman (Jack Thompson). The arduous ass-end of Bicke's life gives Mueller plenty of chances to savage the ethos of salesmanship as few homegrown movies, outside of Mamet, have dared to do. Thompson's bearish bully sums it up nicely, lauding a televised Nixon for lying through his five-o'clock shadow and selling the citizenry not once but twice on an end to involvement in Vietnam.
Penn sweats, whines, wails, and implodes like the immaculate character- research-lab pro he is; insofar as Mueller's film works, it functions as a creepy, nearly nauseating portrait of American loserdom. It's another theme rarely articulated in the Bush years, and Penn walks the talk, fuming at social disrespect and gazing dead-eyed at a quotidian he cannot understand or participate in. He's virtually a lost icon of corporate-capitalism victimhood, particularly when attempting to deal with his estranged wife (Naomi Watts, cold to the touch) and fine-without-him kids.
Narrated with Bicke's worshipful letters to Leonard Bernstein, Assassination is more than a little inconclusive, and Bicke's final Waterloo on board a passenger jet with a briefcase full of gasoline remains as mysterious an act of outrageous self-destruction as when the film began. But the singe of helpless, clueless nobodiness lingers, as it used to in the movies of the Nixon years. (R) MICHAEL ATKINSON
Assault on Precinct 13
Opens Fri., Jan. 21, at Meridian and others
It used to be that folks looked down their noses at B-pictures, only to discover (often thanks to French critics) that they'd seen genius unawares. Classic example: the work of Howard Hawks. John Carpenter proved he was a B-director destined for A-ness in 1976 by updating an old Hawks formula—sheriff with a ragtag crew guards a bad guy in a jail under siege—in his Assault on Precinct 13. Nowadays, we put A-list effort into remakes of such B-classics; they're what we have instead of Aeschylus.
It's director Jean-Francois Richet who tries to reopen our eyes to that formula in his new Assault on Precinct 13, this time concerning a decrepit Detroit police station snowed in on New Year's Eve 2004, with an archcriminal (Laurence Fishburne) locked up alongside some petty criminals, guarded by cop Ethan Hawke and a skeleton crew whose bones rattle with fear that they're about to become skeletons. It's about two-thirds of a fine film, and though it winds down a bit when it can't quite figure out how to resolve itself and still keep the tension taut, it's a satisfying B-picture packed with some talent.
Hawke's age-shrunken head equips him to play bitter disillusionment; he's starting to look like Ezra Pound. Instead of having a Howard Hawks–ian drunk for a partner, he has his own pill habit, the result of guilt over getting his original cop team killed. His demons, though, are just a pasted-on contrivance, as are: Fishburne's allegedly impressive malevolence; Maria Bello's irritatingly flirty neurosis as Hawke's shrink, accidentally trapped in the cop-shop siege; John Leguizamo's junkie paranoia as a criminal who, led by Fishburne, pitches in to defend the station; old-school cop Brian Dennehy's crabbiness; and Sopranos vet Drea de Matteo's tough-sexretary shtick. Leading the assault on them with a pack of faceless troops, Gabriel Byrne just looks glum.
