Weekend in Reviews

I got sidetracked yesterday and forgot to post this.

Body of Lies - Leonardo DiCaprio and Russel Crowe. I am not a fan of Russel Crowe. I know there are a lot of people who think he's hot, I do not. I know there are a lot of people who think he's an especially outstanding actor, I could take him or leave him. So I don't watch a lot of his movies unless they're on TV and I'm particularly bored. Similarly, I don't have any particular attachment to Leonardo DiCaprio. I managed to make it through the entirety of the '90s and most of the '00s without finding him remotely attractive, I do think he's a talented actor and I like a fair number of his films alright but I am hardly ever excited enough about them to see them in the theater. That all changed when both Blood Diamond and The Departed came out in the same year and not only did I really want to see both in the theater, but I thought he was sexy as all get-out in both as well.

What does that have to do with anything? Nothing, I was just mentioning it.

Anyway, in this movie both men work for the CIA and play major roles in the American fight against a particularly nasty cell of Al Quaeda led by a man named Nazir. The plot is complex and in a strange way there's so much going on in the movie that the specific story gets a little lost in the mix. It kept me entertained and interested throughout but there were moments when I was struggling to figure out what the point was. Crowe was mundanely menacing and supremely irritating which is probably to his credit since I am pretty sure that was the main function of his character. DiCaprio was solid as usual but I found myself really distracted by his atrocious facial hair because I'm shallow that way.

Speaking of distracting - the music in this film was a total rip-off of the music in all of the Bourne movies so I fully expected to consult IMDb and find that the same person scored them all and was merely a one-trick pony, but it turns out that the person who scored this movie just shamelessly borrowed Jason Bourne's score and misappropriated it here where it didn't belong.

The best part of the movie was Mark Strong who played Hani and was absolutely the most pitch-perfect, scary-calm, ambiguously-bad good guy I've seen in a very, very long time. Turns out he'll play Lord Blackwood in Sherlock Holmes as well, so add that to the long list of reasons I'm looking forward to that movie.