CATCH A FIRE (PG-13) Director Phillip Noyce's latest political thriller, set against a backdrop of South African apartheid, revolves around an everyman who sees the light and becomes active in the resistance. Stars Tim Robbins, Derek Luke and Bonnie Henna. (Not Reviewed)
DÉJÀ VU (PG-13) ADD-challenged director Tony Scott, back from the dead after Domino, manages to impress with what amounts to a virtual remake of Otto Preminger's classic film noir Laura, re-envisioned here as a post-9/11 sci-fi action flick. Denzel Washington stars as ATF agent Doug Carlin, whose investigation of a terrorist bombing becomes linked to the murder of a beautiful girl whom Carlin, shades of Laura, begins to obsess upon. (This being 2006, though, and Scott being Scott, instead of the elegant femme specter of Laura, Déjà Vu's dead girl is first introduced to us as a mutilated — but still beautiful — corpse.) The movie works backwards and forwards simultaneously, beginning basically as a mystery, with fantasy elements mostly taking the form of high-tech toys, Then, about an hour in, Déjà Vu morphs into full-blown sci-fi, treading deep into time travel territory (albeit with one foot firmly placed in adrenaline-goosing car chase scenes and monster explosions) and, against all odds, makes the fusion work. The scientific basis of the movie's sci-fi is pretty dodgy if you think about it for longer than a few seconds, but Déjà Vu is well worth its admission price as a tightly constructed and well played action-thriller. The film was shot on location in New Orleans, and the local flavor is a major perk. Also stars Val Kilmer, Paula Patton, Adam Goldberg and Jim Caviezel. 3.5 stars
FAST FOOD NATION (R) The take on the wages of junk food offered up here is ultimately a pretty tepid one. Working from a script by Eric Schlosser, who wrote the 2001 bestseller on which Fast Food Nation is based, director Richard Linklater gives us several seemingly unrelated characters and then, shades of Short Cuts and all things Babel-like, cuts between them. Greg Kinnear plays a marketing director on a fact-finding mission to discover how so much cow manure is getting into a fast food chain's beef (this being the nominal mystery driving this curiously shapeless film). Several of the high school kids that the movie introduces us to turn out to be fry cooks with dreams of rebellion (which don't particularly come to much), and the vast majority of the illegal immigrants that the movie follows wind up working in a massive meat packing plant where working conditions are beyond horrific. Linklater cuts between the various characters in a blithely scattershot way that worked fine in Slacker, but that seems weirdly out of place and overly relaxed here, sometimes to the point of trivializing the movie's ability to function as a serious social critique. Characters float in and out of the proceedings with disconcerting randomness (Kinnear actually seems to be the star here until he simply disappears altogether at the mid-point), and, even more bewildering, most of these characters come off as curiously underdeveloped sketches barely come to life. Dietary activists are likely to find Richard Linklater's new film a very minor footnote to Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, rather than an amplification of Spurlock's enthusiastic agitprop. Cineastes and fans of Linklater's impressively eclectic oeuvre are equally likely to be disappointed with a film that, when you get right down to it, just isn't very meaty. Also stars Bobby Cannavale, Paul Dano, Ashley Johnson, Ana Claudia Talancon, Wilmer Valderrama, Patricia Arquette, Kris Kristofferson, Ethan Hawke, Avril Lavigne, Bruce Willis and Luis Guzman. 2.5 stars
FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS (R) As in Unforgiven and other key Clint Eastwood films, Flags of our Fathers is about mythmaking and heroes who are not really heroes. There will be those who hail Flags of our Fathers as Eastwood's most "important" movie for addressing this favorite subject in such an epic and obvious way, but it is for exactly those same reasons that the director's new film feels so turgid. The movie's main characters are the three surviving soldiers from the famous photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima (Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford and Adam Beach), recruited for a nationwide publicity campaign to beef up the war effort. Unfortunately, the circumstances surrounding that photograph are considerably fuzzier and less heroic than they seem, and the three soldiers spend most of the movie trying to keep it together while selling an illusion to the public. For 132 rather long minutes, Eastwood and screenwriter Paul Haggis (master of the ham-fist from Crash) lurch back and forth between scenes showing us the chaos and cruelty of war and scenes showing us how that same war is packaged and sold, sanitized into something curiously bloodless. The battle scenes are plenty graphic but the storytelling sputters and sprawls so badly that it's hard to get emotionally involved. The movie's rhythm is all fits and starts, with several characters appearing out of thin air to briefly take center stage (particularly in the last act) and others so sketchily developed that there's an awful lot of agonizing going on here about people we barely know. The production (by Spielberg) screams class and the material begs to be taken seriously, but Eastwood makes his points in the film's first 15 minutes and then essentially just repeats himself. Also stars Barry Pepper, Paul Walker, Jamie Bell and John Benjamin Hickey. 2.5 stars
