John Wick - **1/2

John Wick is a watershed event in the history of video games. Its designers have somehow overcome the uncanny valley and made a game that has the most incredible graphics I've ever seen. The only problem is that I can't play it, because it's actually a movie. It's full of visual flare and stylistic panache, weighed down by a strange sense of self-seriousness inconsistent with its seeming lack of ambition. It's a satisfying enough popcorn movie until you get through the top layer of butter and realize most of the kernels are stale.

What begins as an almost beautiful look at a man grieving his wife's death quickly shifts gears when a couple of thugs beat him up, steal his muscle car, and kill his dog, a plot turn that signals the introduction of uninvited familiarities. Then it's revenge time. Then it's cheap backstory time: before getting married and settling down, the man was a top-notch killer, "The Boogeyman." Wait, no, "The man you call to kill the Boogeyman." This is all fine while director Chad Stahelski is balancing brutal, matter-of-fact violence with beautiful choreography, and weaving it into a bizarre portrait of a fictitious seedy criminal underworld in New York City. But the momentum stops when Stahelski thinks we have any desire to hear the characters speak all sorts of tired dialogue, and as the plot contrivances start boiling over, our enthusiasm gets turned down to a simmer.

John Wick feels like a great 15 minute short film followed by 90 minutes of alternating action and boring video game cutscenes. No, it's not a game, nor is it based on one, but you might be convinced otherwise while watching it, for it so thoroughly emulates the cheesy storytelling (former hit man wants revenge) and cardboard characters with a singular goal (kill all the bad guys) of an average video game that those who miss it in theaters and pop the Blu-ray into their PS3 will be in for a minor head trip when they come to out of a trance of half-consciousness in the middle of the film and feel a game controller in their hands but are unable to influence what is happening on their TV screen... Especially if it happens to be during the sequence which cross-cuts between Keanu Reeves dispatching Russian mobsters with one of them literally playing a first-person shooter. It even features an in game artificial currency: gold coins redeemable for entrance to the hotel safe-house and favors from allies.

Shoddy storytelling and video game parallels and all, John Wick still manages to entertain on more than just a base-level. Keanu Reeves is an immensely talented actor, engaging even as the tabula rasa titular character in mediocre action films. And Stahelski and DP Jonathan Sela spoil the audience with stunning action sequences saturated in neon light and gorgeous overhead shots of New York City at night. If not for the abundance of hollow dialogue slowing things down, John Wick would easily become an instant cult classic. Instead, it just brandishes the dubious distinction of being simply one of the better action films of a lackluster year. Here's to hoping that that Blu-ray features some spectacular downloadable content.

Out of the Furnace - **

Out of the Furnace, Scott Cooper's follow-up to the mostly good Crazy Heart, is full of the same visual richness as that film was. Set amongst low-lifes and good folks with bad luck in an impoverished mining town. It gets right what a lot of Hollywood films get wrong; Christian Bale plays a normal guy with a welding gig without making a big deal of it... Rather than 'designing' a costume for him and fashioning his hair just-so, it looks like the filmmakers just sent him to a thrift store to grab some clothes off the rack and wear them for a few days straight while letting his hair grow. It's a small detail, but important in registering the film's authenticity. Cooper and his crew nail all of these details, and though the direction felt a little stale, the film still managed to look fresh because of them.

Unfortunately Furnace features the laziest screenplay of the year, complete with the third-act cop-outs that almost ruined Crazy Heart. Bale plays Russell Baze, an honest Joe who briefly goes to prison for killing a few people in a drunk driving accident, an interesting turn in the film that essentially goes nowhere, adding nothing to the character or themes. Russell was on his way home from covering for his brother, Rodney (Casey Affleck), paying off a scumbag loan-shark (Willem Dafoe) who has Rodney throwing underground fights to pay off his debts, scenes which contain more superfluous plot construction than is necessary and which isn't properly utilized. Eventually the film has Russell out for revenge after Rodney and the loan-shark are killed for no apparent reason by some crazy hillbillies who run the New Jersey chapter of this underground fighting ring, but not before one of them butt-dials a buddy with his cell-phone, leaving a voicemail of the murder... Ugh.

There's so much more that is crammed into Furnace's two-hour run-time, but it's impossible to briefly contextualize all of it, mainly because Cooper and his co-writer can't even find a way to contextualize any of it in the film itself. There's a sub-plot with Zoe Saldana as Russell's ex-girlfriend who left him while he was in prison, and another featuring her new boyfriend, a thankless role filled by Forest Whitaker, who I swore was Saldana's father for most of the film due to a lack of clarity and the fact that they barely ever look at each other, let alone touch. It's a confusing dynamic in a pointless sub-plot, only one of several in the film, which together pull so much focus from the story Cooper is trying to tell that it could only barely be said that he tells one at all.

What's worse is that what little there is that is cohesive is riddled with bad dialogue, cardboard characters, narrative convenience, and what can only be described as a lack of umph. It's obvious where every scene is going as soon as it begins, and too many of them are over-the-top or under the mat, completely lacking the edge that it needs for the suspense it wants to build. Fortunately, a top-notch cast delivers all of this with enough conviction to make enough of Furnace compelling enough, even when it's misfiring, so when Russell runs into Woody Harrelson's Harlan DeGroat, the leader of the psycho hillbillies and says, "You got a problem with me?" and Harlan replies, "I got a problem with everybody," only a piece of us laughs at such one-dimensional absurdity, while the rest of us shrugs it off and moves on. And that's pretty much how it goes in Out of the Furnace.

Daybreakers - **

It is a new decade and I am full of hope. Hope that this film caps off this bullshit cinematic vampire infestation we've been sitting through for the last year or two. Hope that this is the last movie soaked in that somber blue Underworld Trilogy/Tim Burton in the 2000s color tone. Hope that this is the last time I have to sit through an Ethan Hawke film wondering how the hell one of the best actors around gets stuck in trash like Daybreakers.

The film follows Hawke's vampire scientist as he tries to find a cure for vampirism and bring mankin---oh, who the fuck cares? You've already seen it a thousand times. This incarnation is a horror film, or a suspense thriller, vampire drama, silly cartoonish comedy, apocalyptic vision of the future, or something else entirely. It succeeds intermittently in some of these categories, mostly in the silliness, though I think that is unintentional. The scariest part: watching a weird homeless vampire sneak up on a rich vampire couple and creep them out. The funniest part: also that weird homeless vampire. The goofiest/most tragic part: that Willem Dafoe, another respectable actor, plays the "They call me Elvis"-human-turned-vampire-turned-back-human-again-through-a-bizarre-coincidence-that-he-and-Hawke-try-to-replicate-for-the-rest-of-the-film character. While he almost makes it work, it is just so outrageous and silly for a film that wants to be so somber, with its Sleepy Hollow blue tone look and its reluctant, do-gooder vampires stuck in a corrupt, blood-thirsty (haha) world. The result is just kind of lifeless (haha, vampires are dead).

It's not my intention to simply complain about a good cast in a moronic film, but how can I not? Watching Daybreakers is watching these fine actors (Sam Neill is also dragged into this mess) waste their talent in a film directed by guys who would rather spend time animating their eyes yellow than develop their characters. Silly flourishes like these are abundant in this film, like showing a banner with Uncle Sam wanting you... to capture humans, or vampires taking blood in their coffee instead of cream and sugar. These things could have been interesting, or at least entertaining had they been used with any subtlety. But instead we get shots of the sub-walk, which has replaced the subway system (vampires cannot be exposed to daylight).

So why did I not totally hate this film? Maybe it's because there was enough silliness and cheap thrills to get me through, like a cartoonish exploding head or cars decked out with light-resistant panels and cameras on top so that vampires can drive during the day; maybe it's because I snuck into The Blind Side directly after and saw how bad films can really be; or maybe it's because I am filled with more hopes, like the hope that Sam Neill will go back to doing genre films with masters like Steven Spielberg or John Carpenter, instead of the Sperig Brothers.