Catchfire (1990)

Anne Benton (Jodie Foster) suffered a flat tire while driving and doesn't have a spare.  She has hardly left the car when she witnessed a murder.  Spotted as she ran away, multiple goons fired at her, but she narrowly escaped.  Of course, the goons figured out who she was from her car.  FBI Agent Pauling (Fred Ward) was ecstatic when he identified the murderer from her description; it was mob boss Leo Carelli (Joe Pesci).  Of course, Anne needed to go into witness protection and her art career would end.  Instead, Anne ran off.  Soon after, some incompetent hitmen came to her apartment, but she again escaped.  Better yet, she once again skipped from the police and Pauling.  Now it was a question of who would find her first.

Lino Avoca (Vincent Price) was the bigger mob boss of the area.  Unimpressed with Carelli's handling of the situation, he sent Milo (Dennis Hopper) to eliminate Anne.  Milo immersed himself in Anne's art, her pictures, her life history.  By the time he located her, he had fallen for her.  He can't kill her.  Instead, he gave her the choice: life as his possession or death.  She chose life.  Now for the least convincing love story since Queen Amadala fell for Anakin Skywalker.

The movie is uneven.  There are instances where it seems like a comedy.  When Anne is running from Agent Pauling by dashing through a minigolf course and hiding in a random structure, who should be inside waiting?  Milo.  Seriously?  He was hiding in this minigolf structure?  And when she ran away again, she successfully avoided a score of FBI agents as well as Milo.  What in the world was Oscar-winner Jodie Foster thinking when she accepted this part?  Much of the dialogue is laughable.  Anne's Stockholm Syndrome (where a kidnap victim falls for the kidnapper) turns on like a light switch.  One moment Milo was forcing her to put on sexy clothes and the next scene they were giggling in bed together.  Yeah, kind of sudden.

Charlie Sheen, who had already done Platoon (1986) and Wall Street (1987), has a tiny role as Bob, Anne's boyfriend.  He performs like this is his first acting gig.  Vincent Price's role is about the same size and he too comes across flat.  John Turturro was about to catch fire after this film.  Here, he is a goofball gunman who wears red shoes without socks.  It looked like he was wearing high heels at one point.  What?  In addition to being the lead actor, Dennis Hopper was also the director.  However, the studio hacked up the film to where he asked to have his name removed, thus Alan Smithee is listed as director.  Perhaps a better movie was left on the cutting room floor, but the parts that remain are bad in and of themselves.  The bad acting doesn't go away if there is more movie, even if the missing parts are better quality.  Hopper wasn't the only one who didn't want credit.  Joe Pesci is uncredited.

Fans of any of these actors should avoid this as it can only hurt your opinion of them.  Bad story, bad acting, just plain bad.  Hard pass.

Elysium

The movie is one long, screeching attack on America.  Max (Matt Damon) is a former car thief who is now working at a robot manufacturing center.  He manages to get a lethal dose of radiation and has only 5 days to live.  Well, he has had this life long dream of getting to Elysium (read America), an Eden-like space station where all the rich people live and greedily keep the good healthcare for themselves.  Max knows Spider, a coyote-like criminal (he smuggles non-citizens onto Elysium) who could get him there so he can be cured.  Earlier in the movie, we saw the shuttles launched from the slums of Los Angeles, one of which landed on Elysium.  Spider has a hair-brained scheme to steal billions from an industrialist, who is evil-incarnate (see, he's a capitalist and rich, so he must be really evil and bad and icky).  Protecting Elysium from illegal immigrants is Delacourt (Jodie Foster), who runs Homeland Security.  Really?  Not Elysium Security?  No, it's Homeland Security, just in case you missed the hammer blows of a political message so far.

The setting, though well done, can't possibly exist.  Spider has a seemingly endless supply of shuttles that can fly into space but lives in a slum.  You know, those things can't be cheap.  He has an impressive computer array with pristine monitors in the middle of a rundown slum.  You know, that isn't cheap either.  He couldn't spend a bit on some paint, maybe some nicer furniture.  One of his lieutenants does brain surgery on Max and also goes on the mission as a gunman.  If this thug can do brain surgery, how is there such a healthcare problem?  At one point, several shuttles are headed toward Elysium, filled with illegal immigrants.  The ONLY method for stopping them is to destroy the shuttles.  Really?  It's either let them land or kill them all.  Wow, let's not make the choice too stark there.  Of course, our Homeland Security Leader blows them up and is disappointed one got through.  Evil-incarnate, don't you know.  Max gets onto the station and, thanks to the effects of his brain surgery, is able to reprogram the computer system ("What are you doing, Dave?") to view every single person on Earth as a citizen of Elysium.  Suddenly, all those robot soldiers/police that seemed nowhere to be found while Max was penetrating to the central computer system are bullying the snooty Elysium citizens and providing free healthcare to the people back on Earth.

The message that is pounded again and again is that the United States should have open borders that offer immediate citizenship and free, universal healthcare.  Oh, and capitalism is bad and mean and yucky.

Going on a tangent, Matt Damon is a resident of "Elysium" who - though crying from the rooftops that public schools are the best and should be supported with more tax dollars - is sending his kids to private school.  His actions seem to be in opposition to his words.