Movie Box Review

PERSON OF INTEREST -  Thursday 9PM on CBS:  If Nothing Else Is On...


It doesn't pay to spend too much time thinking about PERSON OF INTEREST; the sheer idiocy of the premise will just distract you.  It's all a means to an end, and since that end is fairly entertaining, it can be overlooked.


For sticklers, here's the story, as devised by Jonathan Nolan (aka brother of Christopher and co-writer of several of his films, including The Dark Knight).  Reese (Jim Caviezel, known mostly for being Mel Gibson's Jesus in The Passion of the Christ) is a former super-duper government agent and assassin; any resemblance to Jason Bourne is far from accidental.  Something terrible happened to Reese's girlfriend around the time of 9/11, and Reese quit the service, becoming a drunken homeless guy with a really impressive reclusive-novelist beard, yet still fully capable of subduing an entire subway car of creeps.   One day, Reese is approached/abducted by Finch (the King of Enigmatic, Ben Linus--um, Michael Emerson), a mysterious billionaire who created and has access to a government system that gives him the Social Security numbers of people who will shortly be involved in violent crimes--as perpetrator or victim, Finch doesn't know.  He proposes to feed the identities of these people to Reese, so the ex-spook can stop the crimes before they occur.  After the usual reluctance, Reese agrees to become Finch's agent, and there's your show.

Like I said, thinking about all this too much will give you a headache (Interest is produced by JJ Abrams, and it's like his Alias, another fun and ultimately mindless romp where things went boom)--and the show's depiction of our national surveillance system is like an AM talkradio rant come to life.  Really, it's a jerrybuilt structure that will perrmit Caviezel to investigate and solve a criminal situation every week, pursued by the requisite dogged cop (Taraji  P. Henson), who knows something is up with that strange homeless guy.  Also, presumably we'll get more about Reese's and Finch's mystery backgrounds parsed out over the course of the series, although at first glance Reese's doesn't seem too thrilling.   

High-tech and other serialized details aside, Person of Interest is basically an action show, and the pilot as directed by old hand David Semel (the Heroes pilot is among his credits) goes through its paces very efficiently.  Caviezel, his godly duties behind him, is a believable super-spy, and Emerson can put twelve shadings on pronouncing the word "Hello."  Also, the fact that Reese doesn't know week to week whether he's protecting an innocent or pursuing a villain is a nice twist on the genre.

CBS has shown huge confidence in Person of Interest by giving it their prime Thursday 9PM timeslot. Although competition is fierce in the hour (The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Bones, Secret Circle), none of them are flat-out action-adventures like this one, and Mitch Metcalf's Thursday projection has it in a robust second place, just a couple of ticks behind Grey's for the lead.  However dumb, it's an effective show that could interest plenty of CBS viewers.

If you haven't heard (and if you haven't--and you care--consider this a SPOILER ALERT), the 13th episode of AMC's series THE KILLING, its season finale, concluded on Sunday night without answering the question of just who killed Rosie Larsen.  Since this was what the series purportedly set out to do, it's provoked the kind of stunned, sustained outrage that, most recently, Anthony Weiner might be able to appreciate--take a look, for example,  HERE.  And HERE.  And HERE. (It also provoked a puzzling, and somewhat hilarious, series of articles HERE and HERE suggesting that a NY Times critic may simply be incapable of following an ordinary American television series.  Maybe Manohla Dargis just couldn't understand Hangover 2?)

Now, I'm no stranger to the desire to heave something in the direction of my TV set.  (I'm still pissed at the ending of Lost.  No, seriously--don't get me started.)  And I appreciate the fact that AMC didn't renew The Killing for a second season until just a couple of weeks ago, which had it not happened, could have made for perhaps the single most unsatisfying series in the history of television. (Executive Producer Veena Sud swears that the Larson killing will be definitively solved next season.)  But if you were watching the series from the start, you had to know there was going to be some kind of giant reversal in the last 10 minutes--having established at the end of the previous episode that politician Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell) was the likely killer, a show whose pattern was to reverse itself over and over again wasn't going to leave things settled a full episode in advance.  And cliffhanger season finales are hardly new to television:  right now, we supposedly don't know what happened to Cuddy on House, Beckett on Castle, or Pete on Private Practice, or who the new boss will be on The Office.  For that matter, the original murder in the first season of Homicide was never solved; the squad just went on to other cases.

So why the fury?  Especially when, that same night, Game of Thrones aired a Season 1 finale that resolved absolutely nothing, raised new mysteries (dragons!), and managed to be thrillingly satisfying to just about everyone?  One reason was the nature of The Killing.  Unlike Thrones, which from the start has presented a massive, epic canvas of storylines, The Killing really just had one thing to do, which was to solve the Rosie Larsen killing.  To the extent it tried to do anything else in its 13 hours (develop interesting characters, provide a rich picture of the politics and mores of its setting), it mostly failed miserably.  When you read the screeds posted about the finale, you see as much self-directed anger as disappointment in the show itself--why did we stick with this thing, enduring its slow pace, illogical storytelling, and meaningless reveals?  And, in the end, for nothing!  What's wrong with us?

Also, the specific twist that occurred at the end of The Killing's finale was infuriating, because it took the one and only character who had seemed to deepen and become more sympathetic as the series went on--Detective Holder, played by Joel Kinnaman--and said that he had falsified critical evidence, in league at least with some scheming enemy of Richmond, and possibly with the killer him/herself.  Veena Sud would probably say that this was exactly the effect she wanted, something to tell us that we couldn't count on anyone in the show being who they seemed.  (Similarly, the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones had shockingly killed off the one character we non-readers of the novels thought could never be killed.)  But the effect here wasn't to teach us, as Thrones did, that we'd all been looking at the show from the wrong angle; instead it trivialized whatever we thought we understood about the series; it made every plot twist feel even more arbitrary and pointless than it already had.  

The Killing follows Rubicon at AMC, a show with a marvelous premise that self-destructed about as badly as any series ever had.  (It wasn't renewed.)  Rubicon seemed to change its vision every two weeks until it simply imploded; The Killing, if anything, appears so doggedly tied into its mission of drearily subverting every expectation of mystery fans that it's practically a deconstruction of the genre.  (They'll love it in France.)  But what the network and producer seem to have forgotten is that pulling the rug out from under your viewers leaves the audience on its collective ass.  And that's not where you want your fans to be when they still control the remotes.

Sometimes casting can be too good:  Keanu Reeves playing a guy who pretty much sleepwalks through his own life is practically redundant.  His whole style, from the very start of his career in the Bill and Ted pictures (more than 20 years ago!), has been to lag a step behind most other human beings.  One of the reasons he's been effective as an Everyman in action movies like Speed is the humor that ensues from the tension between the insistent pace of the genre and Reeves' perpetual glassiness; he just doesn't seem as quick on the uptake as other heroes.  Even in The Matrix, the Reeves acting moment everyone remembers best is his stunned disbelief that he can do kung-fu (when the Warchowskis turned Neo into a messiah figure in the sequels, they blew the whole franchise).  So while director Malcolm Venville and the producers may have been thrilled to get Reeves--not only a box-office name but the seeming embodiment of their lead character--into the new HENRY'S CRIME, his presence takes a pokey movie and helps turn it into mush.

Henry Tome is a Buffalo toll-booth attendant manipulated by a (slightly) faster-thinking friend (Fisher Stevens) into taking part in a bank robbery, for which he's the only one to do time.  Released from jail, he discovers a much better way to rob the same bank, and decides to do it, recruiting his former cellmate (James Caan), a lifetime con, to help him.  The plan requires tunneling into the bank from the theater across the street, which is staging a production of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" starring a small-time actress (the very big-time Vera Farmiga).  This leads Henry to join the cast of the play as a cover for the crime, and not too surprisingly to fall for the show's lovely star.  

This is hardly Ocean's Eleven, but it's the same basic genre:  the light-hearted caper romance-comedy.  To make it work, you don't necessarily need originality, but wit and pace (and grace) are essential.  In these,  Henry's Crime is mostly lacking. Venville, whose only other film was the talky, violent 44 Inch Chest, never gets a rhythm going, and the script by Sacha Gervasi (who co-wrote Spielberg's The Terminal) and David N White (mostly low-budget action movies) doesn't supply much zing.  "Zing" isn't a word associated with Keanu Reeves, and he drifts through his role as usual, somnolent even when his character is supposed to be coming to life.  In her supporting role, though, Farmiga is quite glorious (this picture makes you wish she could play Diane Wiest's part in a remake of Bullets Over Broadway) and Caan brings a lot to his familiar old-time convict role.  Their work isn't quite enough, though, to make the heist worth the price of a ticket.