1997 - THE EDGE, pretty good adventure film

The Edge seems kind of forgotten in the action/adventure film world, it was photographed in Alberta and British Columbia in some spectacular locations.  It has some good actors, Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, L.Q. Jones and model Elle Macpherson.  Most importantly the writer of The Edge is David Mamet a master of tough guy talk and clever plotting.

The Edge is basically a survival tale with an airplane crashing in the Canadian wilderness leaving a billionaire played by Anthony Hopkins, a fashion photographer played by Alec Baldwin and Baldwin's assistant Harold Perrineau, the survivors of the airplane crash.  As the trio attempts to make their way back to civilization they are pursued by a man eating Kodiak bear. It's sort of Jaws in the woods as it were. The twist in this story is that Hopkins is a bookworm who has never been in the wild but has read so many books he is the best prepared to deal with their situation.

 

Mamet also throws in a subplot of Hopkins figuring out that his wife played by Elle Macpherson is having an affair with Baldwin and that Baldwin may be planning to kill him in order to get his wife and  his money.

 

The performances are at a high level particularly Hopkins as the bookworm.  Mention should be made of the trained bear called Bart.  Bart actually has 21 "acting" credits on his IMDB page ranging from this film to stuff like, The Great Outdoors, 12 Monkeys and Legends of the Fall amongst others.  Bart isn't a Kodiak bear, real Kodiak bears have very long claws and no one in their right minds would be performing with one of them.

The Edge was produced by Art Linson who had a track record of making interesting films.  They weren't always commercial successes but they certainly weren't the usual cookie cutter films that Hollywood likes to make.

The running time is 117 minutes.

2005: XXX: STATE OF THE UNION - Spy vs Spy stuff

Stuck in the house on a cold Saturday night with nothing to do, I found this piece of action movie trash.  This is the kind of film where you sit slumped in a chair watching one hyper action scene after another roll by in a plot that I would call a poor man's version of 7 Days in May.

 

Anyway, Ice Cube is some former hot shot soldier stuck in a federal prison for a crime he didn't commit.  At least I think it was a crime he didn't commit, I wasn't paying attention to closely.  Well Ice Cube is broken out of prison by the head of the NSA played by Samuel Jackson in a variation of a role he has played many times before.  It seems that evil William Dafoe who is a General or the Secretary of Defense is planning on staging a coup to overthrow the government.  Like Jackson, Dafoe has played variations on this type of role as well.

Plot, characterization and dialog in this kind of a movie really means nothing.  This is an action show from the first scene to the last.  Never mind if the scenes make any sense or are a part of the plot, they are just in the movie as a sort of violent low grade pornography.  I can sit slumped in my chair and be sort of entertained but not exactly stimulated or excited

What XXX: State of the Union comes down to is another cookie cutter action film not well made but not poorly made either.   I've seen this movie many times and I will probably spend the rest of my life watching this stuff.

101 minutes, written by Simon Kinberg.