I usually love the kinds of movies that Magnolia Pictures releases, and I also appreciate their strategy of often making their films available in video on demand format at the same time (or often before) they’re available in theaters. But in the case of Take This Waltz, their VoD strategy was kind of frustrating because it was available to watch online for at least a month before it came to a local theater, and it was hard for me to wait to see it in the theater with everyone raving about how good it is. But fortunately the film lives up to all the hype.

Lou and Margot (Seth Rogen and Michelle Williams) are completely in love. They can’t keep their hands off each other, and their marriage is clearly still in the honeymoon phase, despite being several years in. Both are aspiring writers, with Lou working on a cookbook of chicken recipes and Margot wanting to write a novel but taking whatever jobs she can get in the meantime. Most recently, this includes creating a new informational pamphlet for a historic village, and while she’s visiting that village she meets and starts flirting with Daniel (Luke Kirby). It’s all harmless fun since she’ll never see him again, except that when she gets on the plane to fly back home she finds herself in the seat next to his. And when they share a cab from the airport, they discover they live almost right across the street from each other.

All of a sudden, Margot’s perfect marriage starts to seem a little less perfect. Eating chicken all the time seems kind of tiresome, and Lou doesn’t always make himself immediately available at her beckon call. While she adores Lou’s niece Tony (Vanessa Coelho) and loves Tony’s mom Geraldine (Sarah Silverman), Geraldine is a recovering alcoholic with a history of unpleasantness, and the rest of Lou’s family can occasionally be grating. Meanwhile, Margot finds it nearly impossible to avoid running into Daniel, and soon those encounters are frequently not accidental.

Take This Waltz gives us another great performance from Michelle Williams, but this time it’s in a movie that is more worthy of her talents than the disappointing Shutter Island, Meek’s Cutoff, or My Week with Marilyn, and a lot less depressing than Blue Valentine. Similarly, Seth Rogen follows a great dramatic role in 50/50 with another serious film with more refined (but still funny) comedy. I haven’t seen much of Luke Kirby’s work (perhaps only Halloween: Resurrection) to use as a basis for comparison, but he does well in this role and there’s a definite chemistry between him and Williams that makes the story believable and keeps it moving.

It’s unfortunate that this received such a short theatrical run, but hopefully that means it’ll be available to rent or buy soon. It’s definitely worth checking out if you get the chance.

This isn’t the first summer of sequels in recent years, and it seems that audiences are getting tired of them. And now The Bourne Legacy seems to imply that even filmmakers are getting tired of it, because this movie is barely related to its predecessors.

The Bourne Legacy centers around an operative Aaron Cross (played by Jeremy Renner) who is inexplicably in the middle of nowhere, having been off the grid for some period of time. Cross, like many agents, is a kind of guinea pig for secretive government experiments trying to create ever-better super soldiers. One such experiment has him taking regular doses of green pills (which is supposed to improve physical characteristics like strength and speed) and blue pills (which are supposed to improve his mental faculties). His time away from civilization has depleted his supply of each, and he’s in desperate need of a resupply. Especially of the blue pills, because he was apparently a blathering idiot before he started taking them and he’s in real danger of a relapse.

One of the advantages of his being out of touch with the agency is that he’s gotten an unintentional temporary reprieve from the change in the drug regimen given to other soldiers in his unit. Apparently Bourne (who they at least mention on a couple of occasions) did something that could put some of the higher ups in hot water, and they’re trying to cover their tracks. Cross’s unit just happens to be one of the things that has to be covered, so the soldiers’ normal medication has been swapped for suicide pills and now they’re all dead. And now it’s going to be even harder for Cross to get his next fix.

The Bourne Legacy is literally a film about a junkie in search of his next high, except in this case he’s just high on mental competence. Bourne is mentioned a few times and we see his picture at least once, but that’s the extent of his presence in the movie. We do get other characters from the Bourne series, including characters played by Joan Allen, Albert Finney, and David Strathairn, but this one is almost entirely focused on Renner and a pharmaceutical chemist played by Rachel Weisz.

The film is severely lacking in intelligence and originality. It’s got a mind control subplot that might as well have been directly lifted from The Naked Gun, and none of the handful of action sequences is anywhere near as much fun as we got in earlier installments. That’s not really a knock against Renner, since he plays the part well enough, but it’s just such a stupid part in a stupid film that it’s unlikely the movie would have gotten a green light if it had been a part one instead of a part four.

When Little Miss Sunshine came out in 2006, its directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris were relatively unknown, and in the six years since they’ve sunk back into oblivion. They’re finally back with Ruby Sparks, but unfortunately this one isn’t going to do their reputation any favors.

In what is perhaps an unfortunate parallel to the careers of the film’s directors, it focuses on Calvin (played by Paul Dano) as a writer who made a name for himself with a book he wrote ten years ago but hasn’t done anything since. All his attempts to get unblocked have been unsuccessful, but he has recently been having a recurring dream about a girl. His therapist (played by Elliott Gould) suggests writing about her, even if it’s not very good, just to help get him back in the habit of writing. And it works.

Calvin starts writing a love story about this “girl of his dreams”, who he names Ruby Sparks. The more he writes, the more real she becomes and the more he begins to fall in love with his character. But then strange things start happening, and he begins to find articles of women’s clothing lying around the house. And then one day, Ruby appears (played by Zoe Kazan, who also wrote the screenplay). Calvin can’t believe it at first, but everything about her past is exactly as he wrote it. But it’s when he starts to write her present that the problems emerge.

I found Ruby Sparks to be a very difficult movie to watch. The film unfolds in exactly the way you would expect from the premise, and its easily-exasperated and overly-emotional characters kill any sense of fun that it could have provided. The “fictional character comes to life” story has been done a lot (e.g., Pleasantville and The Purple Rose of Cairo, both of which feature great Jeff Daniels performances), and Stranger than Fiction provides an even closer parallel with an author knowingly writing the life of a character that has come to life.

On top of the relatively uninteresting way of telling an uncreative story, I found a number of the supporting characters to be rather annoying. Calvin’s mother and her hippie boyfriend (Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas) seem to be there purely for comic relief, but their scenes were painful and the only relief came when they were over. Steve Coogan, Aasif Mandvi, and Alia Shawkat also have small roles in the film but their talents appear to be largely squandered. In telling her story about a struggling author, it seems that Kazan may also be exposing herself as a less-than-proficient screenwriter.

It’s kind of surprising that Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall is over twenty years old, especially given how familiar it is to current audiences. It certainly doesn’t seem like it would be near the top of the list for a remake, but I was surprised to find that it’s not as bad as it could have been.

In this version of the story, the world has been largely destroyed by chemical warfare and is mostly uninhabitable. Only two populated areas remain: The United Federation of Britain (UFB), and The Colony. They’re on opposite sides of the world and are connected by a tunnel that passes through the earth’s core. The government is located in UFB, but many in The Colony would like their own leadership, and some protests have started to get violent. As a result, the UFB has started to amass a large police force, consisting largely of androids they call synthetic cops, or often just “synthetics”.

Doug (Colin Farrell) works in a factory where they manufacture these synthetics, but he’s kind of bored with his work, and with his home life with his wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale). He’s intrigued by advertisements from a company called Rekall that claims they can make you feel like you’ve just been on a vacation or some kind of adventure by implanting memories into your brain. When he stops in and they give him a menu of choices, he chooses a secret agent package. But he had no idea that he actually used to be a spy, and the attempt to implant new memories triggered latent abilities he didn’t know he had. When he creates a bit of a disturbance that makes him a prime target for the police, his old partner Melina (Jessica Biel) is able to get to him first with the hope of helping him figure out what’s happened with his life.

As should be fairly obvious from the above description, the new Total Recall borrows ideas from the original but also has some pretty major differences. Although there’s a passing reference to Mars, no one gets his ass there in this version of the story. There are plenty of nods to the first version, but they often seem like they’re awkwardly put in just to satisfy some kind of checklist that some executives put together. The appearance of a three-boobed woman is the most obvious example of this, but several others aren’t all that difficult to spot, either.

But even if a lot of the similarities seem forced, I was actually pleasantly surprised by some of the elements contained in the film. I’m glad they didn’t go for a pure remake, and the new version isn’t quite as “out there” in so many ways. There were interesting ideas I’d never seen before, like a gun capable of deploying lots of cameras into a room, but a lot of the other content was clearly borrowed from other sources.

The biggest problem with the remake was its relatively weak ending. They eschewed a number of interesting alternatives in an apparent attempt to rip off elements from Escape from New York, and there are several points at which they could have ended the film but instead chose to keep going. I think that this “when will it end” syndrome, especially combined with the ham-handed way it tried to shove things in from the original, is responsible for much of the backlash the movie has received. It’s not bad, but it is frustrating that it could have been much better with some fairly simple changes.

Attack the Block is one of the best action-comedies of 2011, so it’s not surprising that Hollywood would come out with their own take on the theme. But what is surprising is that it doesn’t completely suck.

Evan (Ben Stiller) is a manager at the Costco store in Glenview, Ohio, but he’s also very involved in community activities and has started a number of clubs, like running and Spanish. When his store’s nighttime security guard meets a very gory death, Evan is hit hard and the best way he knows how to cope is by starting a neighborhood watch club. It doesn’t exactly get the kind of response he’s hoping for, but three people do show up. Franklin (Jonah Hill) has wanted to be a cop all his life but was rejected as mentally unstable. Bob (Vince Vaughn) is just looking for some guys to hang out with and drink. Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade, who plays Moss in the hilarious British television series The IT Crowd) hopes to encounter damsels in distress so that he can have sex with them.

The guys quickly become a laughingstock, both to the police (led by Sergeant Bressman, played by Will Forte), and to the community at large. They’re harassed, pranked, and threatened, but they continue undaunted, mostly due to Evan’s drive to discover what really happened in his store. And as they press on, they begin to find evidence that the killer may not be human, and may not be alone.

It’s not entirely fair to call The Watch a blatant rip-off of any one film because it has as much in common with The ‘Burbs as it does with Attack the Block. And because of its liberal borrowing from other source material, the story of The Watch is really nothing special. The few action scenes lack any real sense of excitement, and much of the comedy is pretty familiar. It seems like Stiller, Vaughn, and Hill are rehashing characters they’ve done over and over again, but not quite to the same effect. And to be fair, Ayoade’s character also feels a lot like what he’s done in The IT Crowd, but I want as much of that as I can possibly get so I’m completely on board with that.

Even if the movie isn’t particularly original, it still managed to get a few laughs out of me (and occasionally from someone other than Ayoade). There are a couple of good cameos that help add to the enjoyment, and even if it doesn’t do a very good job at disguising red herrings, they do sometimes go in pretty unexpected directions. It’s not the kind of movie that you need to think about to enjoy, and there’s a lot less unfamiliar slang and thick accents than in Attack the Block, so that should appease those who had a problem with those elements of the British film.

In case you’re not familiar with the events of the previous films in the Step Up series, here’s a quick recap:

• In Step Up, Nora (Jenna Dewan) is a student at the Maryland School of the Arts (MSA) whose senior dance project is in jeopardy when her dance partner suffers an injury. Fortunately, the school’s streetwise janitor Tyler (Channing Tatum) was there to help. It’s kind of like Good Will Hunting meets Flashdance, except there’s not nearly as much dancing as you’d expect or hope.
• In Step Up 2: The Streets, Tyler briefly returns to convince his friend Andie (Briana Evigan) to attend the MSA. Andie had been a part of a street dancing crew, but they turned their back on her when school activities started to take a lot of her time. So she put together her own crew comprised of several other school outcasts, including Moose (Adam Sevani), in hopes of showing what they can do in a neighborhood competition known as “The Streets”. It’s The Bad News Bears but with dancing.
• In Step Up 3D, Moose has graduated from the MSA and has started college in New York City with best friend Camille (Alyson Stoner, who also had a small part in the first movie). He’s all set to be a serious engineering student until he’s distracted by a guy with nice shoes and eventually ends up in another dance crew. Most of the crew are in a really nice apartment, but they’ve spent all their money lining the walls with boom boxes and shoes. Unless they can win a dance competition, they’ll be evicted for not paying the rent. It’s Breakin’ 2: Electrict Boogaloo but with hip-hop dance instead of breakdancing.

In the latest installment, the action moves down to Miami where a group of kids are trying to win a contest. The first YouTube channel to get at least ten million hits will win a $100,000 prize, and they’re trying to do it with flash mobs. They have no problem with stopping traffic on a busy street or crashing an art exhibition or a fancy dinner, so they make enemies of the public and the law, but they’re in good shape to win the competition. But it could be all for naught if a big real estate developer gets his way and tears down most of their neighborhood in order to build a new luxury hotel resort. It’s this “band of misfits versus greedy corporate takeover” story that makes Step Up Revolution the Ernest Goes to Camp of dance movies.

In most ways, Step Up Revolution is actually a big step down from parts 2 and 3. Aside from the final dance number, which has a much more epic scale than anything else we’ve seen in the series, there’s much less actual dancing in the fourth installment than the second or third, and what we do get usually comes in the form of a flash mob scene that is both short-lived and weirdly-edited. Like the first and second parts of the series, there are also more “classy” dance sequences in connection to a formal dance troupe, but no one really goes to a Step Up movie to see those.

As with its predecessor, Step Up Revolution is in 3D, and that is unfortunately the way that I saw it. The film didn’t really benefit from 3D at all, and in several areas it was significantly hurt by it. A lot of scenes involving fast motion (like much of the dancing) appeared very stuttery, and on the few occasions in which there was a rapid change in the depth of something presented on screen, I found it hard to keep it in focus. That’s probably because a lot of the film was shot with much too shallow focus for a 3D movie so that backgrounds were often blurry. I didn’t like the film’s excessive use of backlighting, and some scenes (like the entire opening sequence) came off looking almost cartoonish so that they appeared more animated than live-action, much as if they were ripped from a Miami-based Grand Theft Auto: Vice City video game.

As if I needed any other reasons to dislike the movie, Step Up Revolution has one of the lamest endings in recent memory. It involves a couple of cameos from the previous films, but they’re just thrown in without any explanation as to what kind of connection they have to the characters of this movie. And of the two big issues resolved by the conclusion, one was a cop out completely lacking in believability, and the other was actively hypocritical and almost the exact opposite of the message they were trying to send mere seconds earlier.

If you see any of the movies in the series, then it’s almost certainly for the dancing rather than the plot. Although Step Up Revolution doesn’t have as much dancing as I’d hoped to see, the final sequence is legitimately impressive, and some of the other flash mob scenes also have good stuff even if they tend to be too short and questionable camerawork. If you really need a dance fix, and if you’re willing to overlook the huge selection of better options on DVD, then Step Up Revolution (preferably in 2D) may do in a pinch.

George W. Bush (or maybe it was Will Ferrell doing an impression of George W. Bush — it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes) once said, “Presidenting is hard.” And while President Bush certainly had some unpleasant experiences in office, he didn’t have to deal with a nation trying to tear itself apart in a civil war. And he definitely didn’t have to deal with vampires.

But Abraham Lincoln (played by Benjamin Walker, who could easily pass for a young Liam Neeson) did. When he was a boy, Lincoln awoke in the middle of the night to see Jack Barts (played by Marton Csokas) near his mother’s bed. Immediately thereafter, she fell ill and died, and Abe was outraged. He didn’t act on his anger out of respect for his father, but that reprieve ended when Abe’s father died nine years later. Barts wasn’t hard to find, but he turned out to be much harder to kill than expected. Jack was only momentarily inconvenienced by a bullet through his eye, and Abe’s life was only spared by the last-minute intervention of a stranger (played by Dominic Cooper).

This stranger later identified himself as Henry Sturgess, and he also said that Jack Barts was only one of many vampires who had infiltrated society and who were getting tired of the need to hide from humans. Henry was on a crusade against these vampires and, with the promise of knowledge that could help take down Barts and others like him, enlisted Abe’s help. Lincoln’s size, strength, and intelligence made him a powerful fighter, and the more encounters he had with the beasts, the more he could see their feelings toward humanity mirrored those of slave owners toward their slaves.

You can’t possibly have a title like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter without expecting the film to be at least a little bit ridiculous, and this movie has that in spades. If you want to see a vampire throw a horse at Abraham Lincoln, or a horse-drawn carriage burst through the side of a house and run into a bunch of vampires, or a rifle that has seven barrels, then you can see all that and more in this film. But it doesn’t really feel like it’s doing this with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, but rather it’s taking it all a little too seriously, and that makes it more painful and less enjoyable.

There are also a lot of problems that don’t arise from the absurd nature of the story line. For example, despite all the events taking place in the 1800s, everyone seems to use anachronistic modern dialogue that doesn’t reflect the speech patterns of their times. There is a severe overuse of intercutting between fast-motion and slow-motion during fight scenes, and a severe underuse of Mary Elizabeth Winstead (as Mary Todd Lincoln) and Alan Tudyk (as Stephen A. Douglas). The film completely skips over most of the politics in a manner that feels very disjoint and unclear on Abe’s motivations for changing career paths from vampire hunter to president.

I read the book about a year ago and really enjoyed it. But even though its author (Seth Grahame-Smith) also wrote the screenplay for the movie, they are extremely different. The film covers only a small fraction of what’s in the book, while at the same time making up several new things. Almost all of the changes are for the worse, and although it may well have been very hard to make a good movie from the book, the resulting film doesn’t really reflect much of an attempt at doing so.

I love Christopher Nolan films. I think that Memento and The Prestige are his best, but even his weaker movies like Following and Insomnia are really good. I’m a big fan of his first two Batman films, and was very excited to see how this master filmmaker concluded the series. While The Dark Knight Rises isn’t a bad film, it does have the unfortunate distinction of being the first of Nolan’s movies that isn’t good.

It’s been nearly a decade since the events of The Dark Knight took place, when Batman took the blame for killing Harvey Dent and instantly went from hero to public enemy number one. It was a good time for Batman to disappear, as politicians were able to ride the people’s wave of emotion to pass some harsh laws against organized crime, and the police have used them to all but snuff it out of Gotham. Conveniently, when Batman went into hiding, so did Bruce Wayne (once again played by Christian Bale). He’s been holed up in his mansion for years, distraught over the death of his almost-fiancee Rachel Dawes, while Wayne Enterprises lost a bundle of money by investing in a fusion reactor project that had to be shut down because some smart guy figured out how to turn it into a nuclear weapon.

Bruce probably would have stayed in hiding indefinitely if it hadn’t been for Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). While posing as a maid, she managed to sneak into his bedroom, break into his safe, and steal his dead mother’s pearl necklace. He wasn’t happy about that, but he was even more curious about why she would have lifted his fingerprints. It turns out that she’d been hired to nab the prints by the head of Wayne Enterprises’ biggest competitor, who was in league with a very mysterious masked villain known only as Bane (Tom Hardy). Bane somehow knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman, and he’s got a plan that will bankrupt Wayne, kill Batman, and destroy Gotham, all in one fell swoop.

After Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, audiences have every reason to expect the third installment to be an action film, but that’s simply not the case. It’s a full hour into the film before Batman makes an appearance, with the time leading up to that littered with Wayne’s moping, Alfred’s complaining, and lots of laying groundwork for later in the film, frequently through sloppy exposition. Batman has less than an hour of screentime in this 164-minute film, and Wayne doesn’t play a major role in much of the remaining content. We get a good amount of Kyle (who usually masquerades as Catwoman when she’s breaking the law), a decent amount of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and newly-introduced Detective Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), not nearly enough Alfred or Fox (Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman), and way too much Bane.

There are many problems with this movie, but the biggest is that its lack of action makes all of its problems more apparent, and seeing the film a second time only further highlights them. The first time I watched the movie, I loved the first real action scene (which involves Batman on a bike), but realized on the second viewing that it was more the relief of finally getting some excitement after an hour of nothing than the actual content of that scene. Other action scenes suffered similar degradation upon a subsequent viewing, and inconsistencies start popping up all over the place.

It’s difficult to further critique the movie without getting too far into plot details. Bane’s voice is annoying, at best sounding like a mix between Sean Connery and Jeff Bridges, and at worst completely indecipherable. Most of the events in the end were relatively obvious because they were meticulously set up earlier in the film. Batman has a couple of new toys, but nothing really spectacular. It’s really just a big disappointment across the board, just like virtually every other big studio release so far this year.

In a summer full of underwhelming mainstream releases, it is reassuring to know that there are still filmmakers capable of brilliance. It’s even more encouraging to learn that for most of those involved in the process, this was their first feature film, except that it’s going to be very hard for them to top it with anything they may do in the future.

Once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived in the Bathtub with her daddy. Hushpuppy (played by Quvenzhané Wallis) is a six-year-old girl, the Bathtub is a shanty town on the Louisiana coast just outside the New Orleans levee, and her daddy is Wink (Dwight Henry) who has to take care of her alone after the death of his wife. They, like the other residents of the Bathtub, are very poor, but they do a lot of celebrating with food and friendships. That celebration usually includes a lot of drinking, and Wink’s frequent indulgence often makes him less attentive than he should be, which in turn has made Hushpuppy more independent and self-sufficient than other girls her age. And that’s probably a good thing, because her father is also sick.

Because it’s outside the levee, the people in the Bathtub are usually left alone, but they’re also in constant danger of floods. Minor flooding isn’t uncommon, but a big one can put everyone at risk. When a big storm approaches, some residents choose to evacuate, but the more stubborn of them (like Wink) intend to ride it out no matter what.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is unquestionably the best film I’ve seen all year. It has so many emotional extremes, and the mood can change so quickly that you’re not always sure what to feel. You immediately forge a strong connection to Hushpuppy, which leads to what I honestly believe are a few of the most terrifying scenes ever recorded, and she also delivers one of the saddest lines ever uttered. Wallis should be a shoo-in for a best actress nomination with one of the strongest performances in the last several years.

Although there’s a lot of fear and sadness, the film is still pure joy to watch. There are enough scenes of pure elation and utter cuteness to lighten the mood, but even at its darkest the movie is so perfectly executed that it becomes completely engrossing. You’ll almost certainly walk out of the theater on a high, but you’ll probably also be completely spent so it’s not a good choice to plan to see it immediately before any other movies.

Because I took so long to write the review, I had an opportunity to see it again, a week after my first viewing. I think that I needed the full week’s recovery after seeing it the first time, but it was just as powerful the second time around. The scenes I’d found terrifying the first time through didn’t have the same effect because I knew what was going to happen, but if possible I think that every other emotion came through even more strongly. The rewatch firmly cemented my initial impression that Beasts of the Southern Wild is the best film of the year.

Oliver Stone used to direct good movies. Films like Platoon, Wall Street, and JFK are legitimately great movies that are much more entertaining than their subject matter should afford. But several of his more recent films have been so disappointing or disinteresting that I was afraid he’d lost his touch. Fortunately, while Savages has its flaws, it’s also a step back in the right direction.

Ben and Chon (Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitch) are best friends who share everything, even their mutual girlfriend Ophelia (Blake Lively). They’re in the business of growing and selling marijuana, with Ben as the botanical and financial brains of the operation, Chon as the brawn, and Ophelia (who usually just goes by “O”) as their mutual plaything. Business is very good, thanks in large part to Ben’s ability to engineer ever more potent strains, and their competitors are getting worried. And in this business, getting worried often means getting violent.

Lado (Benicio Del Toro) is the lead henchman and enforcer for a Mexican drug lord, and he’s been sent to convince Ben and Chon that they it would be in their best interests to form a partnership, with them supplying the product and the Mexican cartel using their network to sell it. Of course, Ben and Chon don’t really like the idea of giving someone else a share of the profits for a service that they don’t want or need, but they have no choice but to accept after the Mexicans kidnap O and use her as a bargaining chip. And then they started preparing to get her back.

First, the negatives. Savages is unnecessarily long, and its slow pacing really helps emphasize that. If they’d compressed it by about twenty minutes, it would have been much less tedious and more entertaining. I also really dislike the ending, which seems like a real slap in the face to the intelligent viewer. It’s the kind of ending that has worked well in other films, although most of them are comedies, and they also didn’t take it to quite the extreme that Savages did. A film’s ending can greatly impact your ultimate impression of it, and I think that a better ending would have helped forgive some of its other problems.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the basic story (except for the ending) and much of the supporting cast. I didn’t really care for Ophelia as a character or Blake Lively’s portrayal of her, nor did I completely buy her love triangle with Ben and Chon, but it did provide opportunities for good performances from John Travolta and Salma Hayek, and more peripheral parts for Emile Hirsch, Demián Bichir, and Joel David Moore. With a more likeable female lead (and perhaps one for each of the guys rather than sharing one between them), I think it would have been a pretty good film.