Doing the right thing

Noel Vera

"16 Blocks," Richard Donner's unpromisingly titled new action flick
(it sounds like a movie about bricklayers) is, in effect, his latest
stab at the big time; the director of blockbuster hits like
the "Lethal Weapon" movies arguably hasn't had a real hit in seven
or eight years, and has directed more than his share of big-budgeted
duds ("Maverick" and "Assassins" come to mind).

And to tell the truth, Donner's record at the tills is at best a
secondary interest; the films themselves have a visual consistency
that you might consider the mark of an auteur, if it wasn't so,
well, consistent. Donner was a veteran TV director who graduated to
films and brought with him the kind of storytelling guaranteed to
keep an attention-deficit audience glued to the screen--loud music,
hugely violent action setpieces, a gigantic explosion every half
hour or so. Occasionally he will come up with a comedy, and
occasionally it's even amusing--"Scrooged" comes to mind, though
arguably that's mainly due to Bill Murray's heroic inability to (for
most of the running time) take himself or the movie seriously (by
the final scene, though, he succumbs, and it isn't a pretty sight).
His more characteristic work is the "Lethal Weapon" series, where
Donner's idea of comedy is to have Mel Gibson mug relentlessly at
the camera for a hundred-plus minutes (somewhere along the line
Donner added Joe Pesci, who is, if anything, even less subtle).

Donner is not what you'd call a director with a deft touch; maybe
the last time his films had any easygoing charm was way back in 1978
with "Superman," and that was mostly because of Christopher Reeve,
who wore the mantle of World's Greatest Superhero lightly on his
shoulders (if it weren't for him, that picture would have fallen
harder than a ton of kryptonite).

You can't help but watch "16 Blocks" with, at best, mixed feelings.
Lt. Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis), is asked to deliver prisoner Eddie
Bunker (Mos Def) sixteen blocks across New York City to the
courthouse; as it turns out, Bunker is witness against corrupt cops,
and those same cops are planning to take him out before he delivers
his testimony. Donner seems to have taken this story about an aged
has-been given a last chance at redemption to heart; he's mostly
dropped the sniggering humor and the louder action-movie effects (no
gigantic gasoline explosions, no obvious use of CGI) and actually
focused on Mosley's bleakly depicted predicament. I like it that
instead of high-caliber artillery Mosley depends on street smarts
and his knowledge of the area ("these are his streets," colleague
Frank Nugent (David Morse) notes--though you wonder why, if they've
worked together for so long, can Mosley so easily run circles around
his former partner). I like it that instead of showing us the usual
Manhattan tourist traps (the Empire State Building, the Statue of
Liberty), Donner sticks to the alleys and back doors of the various
shops and apartments people actually live in (with Toronto doing
understudy for parts of the city).

On the other hand, Donner still doesn't quite know how to photograph
and cut an action sequence so that you'd actually know who is doing
what to who, where, and why; he still favors tight, shaky shots, and
he still likes to cut so that the action seems this side of
confusing (only his filmmaking sense isn't good enough to always
keep him on this side). Donner is no longer the most blatant
practitioner of this kind of "smash and crash" style of filmmaking--
hotshots like Michael Bay and Tony Scott have exceeded Donner's
excesses by miles--but in a way it makes Donner's situation that
much more sad: he's not just not completely reformed, he wasn't all
that great a sinner in the first place.

Then there's Donner's seeming reliance on our appetite for this kind
of familiar, no-frills action flick. The movie is essentially a
modestly budgeted "B" picture, the kind that helped build Clint
Eastwood's fortune before he became an award-winning filmmaker
(frankly, I liked Eastwood before he started winning awards), and it
has the virtues of these kind of movies: a lack of pretentiousness,
a straightforward spirit, a relative economy of means. The movie,
however, also shares the genre's limitations: clichés (has-been
cops, odd couples bonding), conventions (the villain just has to
make a big speech before the final climax), the sense that this is
all you're going to get, and it (after all is said and done) isn't
all that much.

As the film's star Bruce Willis is in his 'serious actor' mode--no
wisecracks, no wide grins, and he shows that even without the comic
props he can still generate rapport. As the comic black sidekick
meant to bond in a manly, heterosexual way, Mos Def gets to riff on
everything from birthday cakes to (of course) changing the course of
one's life, and while he doesn't really get any memorable lines, his
freeflow flood of words and gentle aura does have its charm. Put
together, the two don't quite work up the chemistry Nick Nolte and
Eddie Murphy had in Walter Hill's "48 Hours," but they get by.

Liking the movie largely depends on whether or not you like Willis,
or Def, or Donner's not-quite stripped-down visual style; if you do,
then the picture's not a total waste of time; if you don't (and I do
think Donner has yet to answer for a large part of his moviemaking
career), there's some satisfaction in seeing a Hollywood hack
brought down to humbler circumstances.

(First published in Businessworld 3/10/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)