Conspiracy Theory (1997)

Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) is a New York City cab driver who lectures most of his passengers about various conspiracy theories that he holds to be gospel.  After work, he parked near an apartment building and spied on Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts) as she runs on her treadmill.  Next, he takes a pile of newspapers to his cramped apartment that has plentiful locks on the door, and even locks on the refrigerator.  He reviewed the papers and highlighted the important stories.  Soon, he types up his newsletter: Conspiracy Theory.  This issue proposes that someone is trying to assassinate the president via an earthquake during a visit to Turkey.  The space shuttle will trigger the earthquake from orbit.  Yes, of course.  He sent the newsletter - each one from a different mailbox - to his subscribers.  He has one more person to inform: Alice.

Alice Sutton is a lawyer with the Justice Department and has had regular visits from Jerry over the last six months.  Both she and most of the office staff view Jerry as a crackpot but she humors him.  He had saved her from a mugging, which was their first meeting.  He asked her to warn the president about the earthquake.  She is noncommittal.

Then Jerry is snatched from the street, taken to a secret location, and interrogated by Dr. Jonas (Patrick Stewart), who uses harsh methods.  He asks who else knows?  Knows what?  Jerry has no idea which of his theories might have been true.

Mel Gibson is terrific as a paranoid crackpot.  He freestyled much of his conspiracy talk in the taxi, which is some of the funniest bits.  When he warns a pair of nuns against the Vatican, you have to laugh.  This is a complicated character and an excellent job of bringing him to life.  Roberts is good in the role of Alice, but it isn't as interesting a character as Jerry.  Patrick Stewart is great at Dr. Jonas.  This was probably the first time I had seen Stewart play a villain.  He can be menacing and scary in his interrogation scenes with Gibson and then entirely sympathetic and sincere when talking to Roberts.

When released, conspiracy theories were viewed as ridiculous and silly.  That is no longer true today.  Because conspiracy theories were generally laughable and easily dismissed, it became common to accuse one's opponents of spouting conspiracy theories.  What is labeled a conspiracy theory has expanded so much that many have since been proven true.

Great popcorn fun.  Recommended.

RIP Patrick Stewart

Bird on a Wire (1990)

Marianne Graves (Goldie Hawn) is a successful New York lawyer on a business trip to Detroit.  While there, she stops at a gas station/garage and recognizes the gas attendant.  It's Rick Jarmin (Mel Gibson), her fiancé who went missing in Mexico fifteen years ago!  He denies it, claiming to be from Tennessee.  No sooner does she leave - not entirely convinced - than he called the FBI and demanded to be relocated.  Yes, he is in witness protection.  His regular contact unavailable, he is routed to Joe Weyburn (Stephen Tobolowsky), who agrees to move him in a couple of days.  That night, Marianne returned to the garage to take another look.  To her surprise, armed men attack the garage.  She recklessly drives at them and manages to get Rick in the car and race away.

The men were Eugene Sorenson (David Carradine) and Albert Diggs (Bill Duke), former DEA agents.  Sorenson is fresh out of prison, put there by Jarmin's testimony, and is eager for revenge.  Diggs has been on the lam for the last 15 years and would like to kill the only man who could put him in jail.

Rick knew that someone at the FBI had revealed his location.  Worse, the police were now looking to arrest him and Marianne for the shootout at the garage.  They were on the run!  Lou Baird (Jeff Corey) was the only man Rick trusted to sort things out.

The movie is one long chase with romantic comedy between the leads along the way.  The chase takes many forms.  There are car chases, motorcycle chases, a helicopter chase, and finally a showdown at a zoo.  During their cross-country escape, Rick visits several of his previous protection locations, which shows that he has had an interesting career path: carpenter, hairdresser, car mechanic, veterinary clinic pilot, and zoo employee.  Each came with a different name and even a change in personality.

Goldie Hawn was in amazing shape for her age.  There are multiple semi-nude shots or lose skirts that got caught in a breeze to demonstrate that.  The script was not great in explaining her continued presence on this adventure.  Does she view Rick as the one that got away?  Yeah, but she does seem rather annoyed with him for much of the movie.  Does running make sense because the police are after her?  Not really.  It's like the script forgot she was a successful lawyer; I suppose criminal law wasn't her thing.

Mel Gibson is Mel Gibson.  There is a little bit of variety with the change in accent based on what former life he is visiting, but otherwise it is a standard Mel Gibson character.

The villains are introduced grandly and then become cardboard cutouts who prove mostly incompetent.  Sure, it's a comedy - sort of - but the villains can't hit an easy target with superior weaponry and even fully automatic fire.  The finale was a comedy of errors by Rick and Marianne.  They both lost weapons before they could even use them, each either beaten or shot, and yet they survived.  Yeah, these are some really pathetic villains.

Just okay.

Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

Detective Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) crouched on a fire escape outside a window when he heard someone coming up the metal steps.  It proved to be his partner, Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn).  They briefly bantered and noticed a nearby neighbor watching them.  Soon, they heard a knock, and the third cop was there to flush out the perp.  Sure enough, Vasquez crawled out the window only to find himself handcuffed and interrogated.  All seemed great but the neighbor filmed it and sent it to the news.  It didn't look good.  A six-week suspension followed.

Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) was fresh out of prison and found his mother turning tricks to pay the rent while his younger brother played computer games.  His pal, Biscuit (Michael Jai White), had a job.  Henry was willing but made sure to have some guns wrapped in cellophane.  "Why's that?" Biscuit wanted to know.  Sometimes, you don't have time to put on gloves.

Ridgeman lived in a bad neighborhood and his daughter was frequently harassed.  It was only a matter of time before she was of an age to get raped.  His wife was disabled.  He needed to score some money to get them out of the neighborhood.  He got a tip about a heist from a man who owed him.  Roping Lurasetti into the caper, the pair spent several days watching for Lorentz Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann).  Eventually, a pair of black men picked him up and drove off.  Brett and Tony followed.

The movie proves to be quite violent at times.  Vogelmann's goons, masked men in black who are differentiated only by the color of their gloves, proved to be killing machines.  When each is introduced, a couple of corpses are left in their wake.  At no point do they take off their masks.  Henry and Biscuit are brought into the crew as driver and spotter.  Of course, the suspended cops and the bank robbers will have a confrontation.

By the same man who wrote and directed Bone Tomahawk, the menace of the gloved men reminds one of the mysterious cannibal Indians from that movie.  Though Henry and Brett are the main characters, neither is particularly likable.  Brett is a cop who has gotten more jaded with each passing year, inured to inflicting violence on criminals.  Henry is a criminal, but he has a code of ethics.  He proves to be the best at seeing all the moving parts despite being relegated to a minor role.

Slow and plodding with moments of intense violence.  Meh.  Just okay.

Flight Risk (2025)

Somewhere in rural Alaska, Winston (Topher Grace) was cooking a cup of noodles in his motel microwave when the door burst in.  Two local cops and US Marshal Madolyn Harris arrest him.  A couple of days later, Madolyn loaded Winston into a barebones charter plane.  The pilot, Daryl Booth (Mark Wahlberg) was a chatty fellow, who offered a history of how he found his way from Texas to Alaska.  Shortly after takeoff, Madolyn learned that both the radio and the GPS were offline.  Then Daryl talked about them going to Seattle; he's only taking them to Anchorage.  It turned out that Daryl was an assassin dispatched to kill Winston before he could testify against a mob boss.  Neither Mandolyn nor Winston can fly a plane.

There is a lot of inadequate securing of Daryl when he is subdued.  Repeatedly!  By the same token, Daryl had subdued Madolyn and then failed to secure her.  Everyone is needlessly reckless and it costs them again and again.  To add to the tension, it becomes clear that Daryl got information from within the Marshals, making her question her allies on the other end of the actually working radio.  Is she just flying into a trap?

A Mel Gibson film, it is just okay.  I'm sure that Wahlberg enjoyed the opportunity to play a bad guy and Michelle Dockery is a long way from Downton Abbey's Lady Mary here.  Far off type, which is cool and they are good in their roles.  No, it is the script that fails.  In order for the flight to have several fights, the characters must leave the opponent in a position to escape or fight back.  The characters must be dumb or the story would end after the first fight.  Meh.

Hacksaw Ridge

Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) is a Seventh-Day Adventist from Virginia.  During World War II, he feels obligated to join the army though he also refuses to touch a gun; he wants to be an Army medic.  This results in a lot of trouble with his NCOs and his commanding officers.  Even so, he is allowed to go to war, armed only with bandages.  He proves his worth in Okinawa on Hacksaw Ridge.  The trailer pretty much tells the plot, the movie just offers the details.

 

With this being a biopic of Desmond, Mel Gibson gets too distracted by the actual combat.  The bloody and gruesome battles last entirely too long.  Much of that should have been on the cutting room floor, perhaps added to the eventually DVD as an extended deleted scene.  After watching the movie, I was of the impression that Doss must have joined in 1944 or 1945 and Okinawa was his first deployment.  Nope, he joined in 1942 and served in Guam and the Philippines before arriving in Okinawa.

 

Amazingly, the movie undersells Doss.  The movie has him carried on a stretcher with a serious leg wound and evacuated from the ridge.  In fact, he swapped places on the stretcher with a soldier he judged to be in worse shape, was then shot in the arm by a sniper, and eventually had to crawl several hundred yards to an aide station.  Gibson thought that was too unbelievable to include.  It was particularly satisfying that the movie concluded with interviews of Desmond Doss, his brother, and his captain.

 

Though Doss is certainly worthy of great praise and a true hero, the movie is mostly padding for his eventual heroic acts.  I was very much reminded of Sergeant York.  In that movie, Gary Cooper plays Alvin York, who famously killed more than 2 dozen Germans and captured another 132 at the battle of Meuse-Argonne.  His actual claim to fame was maybe 10 to 15 minutes of film.  The added two hours were just filler.  Not bad filler but filler nonetheless.  Hacksaw Ridge shares that problem.