items tagged with Brad Pitt

In a colon-happy summer that’s already given us X2: X-Men United, Dumb & Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, this past week saw the debut of three more excessively wordy titles: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. While these longer monikers are, admittedly, kinda helpful – they give you a good idea of what to expect from the Terminator and Legally Blonde sequels, and the Sinbad subheading assures you that, no, it’s not a concert film featuring the one-time Star Search champion – they can play hell on print reviewers with limited space. So, for purposes of this article, the aforementioned will hereby be referred to as T3, LB2, and ... oh, I guess Sinbad will do.

MINORITY REPORT

Last summer, when Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction epic A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was released, it was greeted with a few rave reviews but near-universal audience apathy. Working from material shepherded by the late Sultan of Cynicism, Stanley Kubrick, Spielberg directed the film as if Kubrick’s ghost perched on his shoulder, demanding that every scene be moodier, uglier, and above all slower than the one than preceded it; the film was brilliantly designed but emotionally vacant, and it drained you of your energy.

OCEAN'S ELEVEN

Danny Ocean has an idea. Just paroled from prison, this Las Vegas smoothie (played by George Clooney) decides to rip off three of the city’s casinos, the profits from which are all stored in one underground safe. In order to successfully pull off the caper, Ocean assembles 10 of the smartest, shiftiest cons he knows to form a labyrinthine plot that’ll net the crooks upwards of $160 million. The problem: The safe in question is more heavily guarded than Fort Knox, and getting in the vault is small potatoes compared to how difficult it will be to leave the area once they have.

SPY GAME

Tony Scott’s Spy Game opens with one of those enjoyably implausible preludes we’re used to seeing in the James Bond series: It’s 1991, and American CIA agent Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) is attempting to free a female captive (Catherine McCormack) from a Chinese prison. How will he accomplish this task? Why, by masquerading as a doctor called in to give vaccinations to the inmates, feigning fatal electrocution after touching a wired prison fence – which results in the momentary shut-down of the prison’s electrical power, including its surveillance cameras – lying “dead” on a hospital gurney, fleeing the scene when no one’s looking, scrambling down ratty corridors in search of the captive, bribing a mentally defunct witness with a piece of gum, and accompanying the prisoner back to the “dead” man’s gurney, where prison guards will unknowingly escort the duo to an ambulance and then to freedom. And what trips up the plan? The gum.

THE MEXICAN

We’ve had the evidence for years, but I think it’s time we made it official: Brad Pitt is a gonzo supporting player stuck in a (rather dull) leading man’s body. Recently, he portrayed the heavily-accented Irish boxer in Snatch, giving the film a jolt of pure, comedic adrenalin – his screen time was brief, but he was the most entertaining performer in the movie – and when he appeared as a supporting actor in 12 Monkeys, Thelma & Louise, and True Romance (probably his best, and easily his funniest, screen work), his performances were well-calibrated and often inspired. Pitt can display a true flair for off-kilter comedy; it’s telling that his most enjoyable lead performance has come from the darkly comic cult film Fight Club, where his Tyler Durden was clearly one of Pitt’s nutjob character roles gone berserk.