Bad Cops/Bad Wall Street Flicks: The Son of No One; Margin Call

By Victoria Looseleaf

The nadir of thriller cop movies, The Son of No One reeks of wrongness, starting with the inane and meaningless title. It’s also got more annoying flashbacks than LSD guru Timothy Leary must have experienced during his entire lifetime. That said, writer/director Dito Montiel (we never heard of him before this, either…), has not only cranked out one of the worst films in recent memory, but he’s made some good actors look like neo-losers.

Dubbed in the press notes (where Montiel’s name is misspelled), “a searing police thriller” (to us, steaks are searing, police thrillers either cut it or they don’t – where are Antoine Fuqua and Training Day or Michael Mann and his brilliant Heat when you need them), the film revolves around Jonathan “Milk” White. A second-generation cop, he’s tacitly freaked out when he’s assigned to re-open a double homicide case from his old Queens neighborhood, a 16-year old cold case. Guess what? It was Johnny, himself, who was the murderer of the two skeeves, when he was but a wee boy. As an adult, Milk is played by an unwatchable Channing Tatum, who barely says 1,000 words during these 95 minutes of cinematic torture in which he acts like, well, an inert mime.

It’s no surprise then, that immediately following the murders Milk says nothing. He was also protected at the time by his father’s partner, a wizened Detective Stanford, played by the redoubtable Al Pacino. Wearing a wig that looks like a cross between Liberace and a Lucien Freud nude (don’t ask…but click here for our latest musings on the sequined pianist, including the upcoming Soderbergh-directed biopic), Pacino rasps his way through the flick. Meanwhile, a local reporter for a sleazy tabloid (Juliette Binoche is completely miscast as a disheveled Queens journo with the weirdest accent this side of Kazakhstan), has new information on the long-unsolved murders and goes about trying to get her scoop before she reaches a ridiculous end.

Hmm: What desperately needs scooping is the crap found on screen here. Indeed, in spite of the fact that we love, love, love Binoche and her risk-taking bent, there’s no hope for her in this film. From Louis Malle’s Damage with Jeremy Irons and her understated Oscar-winning performance in The English Patient, she’s always been stellar. Two years ago she even performed and toured with Kathak dancer Akram Khan in a duet he choreographed. (See video below.)

But we digress, as there’s even more onscreen lunacy contributing to this film being forgettable. How about the whining, plasticized presence of Katie Holmes, Johnny-boy’s wife and mother of their 5-year old seizure-prone daughter, a character who never has a seizure and has nothing to do with the plot. Then there’s Ray Liotta (below), as Johnny’s boss, Captain Mathers (a bit bloated, the dude can still act – calling Henry Hill! Too bad his efforts here are for naught). Finally, in the thankless role of a brain-damaged witness to the long-ago crime, a grown-up Tracy Morgan plays against type in a maudlin, mercilessly unfunny performance.

Montiel has no sense of storytelling, pacing or feel for any kind of reality. He also piles on so much melodramatic music (David Wittman and Jonathan Elias), that we feel as if we’re punch-drunk on a ferris wheel traveling in über-slow motion. But we marvel at the fact that Binoche, Pacino and Liotta would stoop lower than any  Queens’ gutter to make such a film. Then we remember it must be for the money, although it doesn’t look as if Montiel had much of a budget. Stranger things have happened in Hollywood and there certainly have been worse movies. Too bad we can’t think of any just now. To quote Pacino, who has the best lines and tackles the thespian thing with his usual off-the-charts brio, “A man has to learn to live with shit.”

True dat, but must we live with it, too?

Outré in all respects (but fabulous, nonetheless), this Lucian Freud nude, by dint of its “de trop” factor, reminds us of Pacino’s wig in The Son of No One.

Oh: We’d be remiss if we didn’t add Margin Call to our current list of non-thrilling “thriller” movies. Described in that film’s production notes as an “entangling thriller,” Margin Call is, like Monteil’s Son of No One, J.C. Chandor’s attempt at an auteur-wannabe’s foray into writing and directing. Chandor, too, assembled a formidable cast, but in the yawn-inducing process of crafting a non-plot – Occupy Wall Street‘s got more going for it – Chandor made Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, etal, look as if they were floundering in the Dead Sea. For once, it seems, we at The Report are on the same page as Rex Reed – and in total disagreement with The New Yorker’s David Denby. (Should we cancel our subscription to that sacrosanct mag, or just chalk it up to the fact that when we saw Margin Call we had just learned that Steve Jobs had died? Whatever…)