Colm Feore

  • And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) As much as the past decade’s boom in streaming services has been a boon for cinephiles, part of me wonders about the aftermath of such business model experimentation, especially when the services have every intention of locking up their own productions. No physical editions, no licensing agreements with other platforms or broadcast, and no way other than a subscription to see the films. (Or piracy, which becomes far more justifiable.)  What if there’s a genuine work of art (or entertainment) locked away behind a subscription? What if the services shut down? As evidence of how these fears are not unjustified, I offer films like And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, a slick medium-budget effort developed and broadcast by HBO two decades ago. The HBO filmography is a case in point for my questions: it’s large, and it’s almost entirely locked up within HBO. There are a few DVDs and a few foreign-language licensing deals (all hail French-Canadian TV!) but these movies run the real risk of being buried forever. Have you heard about And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself? What if I told you that it stars such notables as Antonio Banderas (as Villa), Alan Arkin, Jim Broadbent, Colm Feore, Kyle Chandler and Saul Rubinek? What if I promised you explosive sequences of the Mexican Civil War? What if I lured you in with a credible portrayal of the 1910s cinema industry and the kernel that eventually led to modern Hollywood action movies? It’s a surprisingly interesting film – although it may take film nerds to love that opening sequence drawing back from a vintage silent film scene to its HD making-of in one seamless shot capped off by “Fort Lee, NJ: Movie Capital of the World.”  Similar care goes to the way it integrates historical fact: The portrayal of Villa is often sympathetic but ultimately not sugar-coated – And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself overtly acknowledges that he was a murderous revolutionary. It makes for a really interesting film – especially if you happen to have missed it the first time around and didn’t know about its existence. How many films will be buried behind a subscription, unable to breathe and find their audience? How many films will be unfairly forgotten behind those gates?

  • Trigger Point (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Either I’ve seen too many hitman dramas lately, or Trigger Point is the dullest, most obvious possible film in that subgenre. An unfortunate low-budget product of Canadian Content requirements (I’m proud of Canadian films, but not this one), Trigger Point makes a tepid blend of very familiar genre elements, starting with a semi-retired special operative (Barry Pepper, probably the most affordable “name” actor they could find) asked for one last mission by a former boss. That, for most genre fans, should ring alarm bells: he’s obviously being set up to be killed by his former mentor and, well, that’s the plot right there. But ah-ha, you hope, if the premise is lame, maybe the execution will be better? No such luck, alas: Director Brad Turner can’t make magic with the material and budget he’s working with, so all we’re left with as slightly awkward sequences of actors holding their guns, glaring each other and occasionally taking a shot. While I like the idea of a hitman drama being shot in and near Hamilton (Ontario), it’s not even the best such film—have a look at Things I Do for Money instead. But back to Trigger Point: there’s no escaping that this is a dull retelling of familiar genre tropes with no flavour whatsoever. More generous audiences will appreciate the small-town atmosphere, but there really isn’t enough here to satisfy. Pepper gives it all he’s got, but there’s little for him to do in the script he’s going through. Colm Feore is a highlight as always, but that doesn’t mean much when compared to the rest of the film. It’s said that the film could lead to a possible trilogy, and the only rational answer to that is a quiet “Please, no. That’s enough.”

  • Sugar Daddy (2020)

    Sugar Daddy (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Even the dullest viewer will eventually figure out that Sugar Daddy is a vanity project for multitalented musician-actress Kelly McCormack, who wrote, produced and stars. When she’s not in the middle of the film’s scenes, it’s because the narrative stops dead in its track to deliver musical interludes that reinforce how other characters talk about her protagonist as a musical genius. But as with some other vanity projects, McCormack doesn’t self-insert as a flawless character. In fact, her protagonist is so flawed that she drags the film down with her: sullen, prickly, joyless, with such poor social graces that she turns to escorting older men when she gets fired from a last-chance job. (Somehow, her clients are charmed by her irritating bluntness — another mark of a vanity project.)  She sexually assaults her roommate at one point, hurls abuse at her sister for daring to sleep with that roommate… and yet somehow is supposed to be the one we cheer for. There are high points to the film, but you have to wait for them: Colm Feore is terrific as an older man seeking company, while the film’s high point is probably a frank discussion examining various perspectives on young women escorting older men (even in a non-sexual way). There’s some wit in Sugar Daddy, but it’s not carried through the rest of this singularly disappointing film. I strongly suspect that I’m the wrong audience for it, but that doesn’t excuse its missteps along the way.

  • “Screen One” Hostile Waters (1997)

    “Screen One” Hostile Waters (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) It’s rare for a TV movie to take on real-life military history, especially in as rarified a field as submarines. On the other hand, it does seem like a nice fit—If you’re going to go for military intrigue, what cheapest way to do it than with limited sets and a bit of murky CGI to make up the exteriors? Accordingly, BBC production Hostile Waters offers a number of familiar actors in lead roles, starting with Rutger Hauer and Martin Sheen as duelling submarine captains, with supporting roles for Max von Sydow and Colm Feore. Much of the film professes to reflect the truth of the real-life K-219 incident — in which a Soviet submarine suffered a catastrophic malfunction near the eastern seaboard—, based on a book digging into events never formally acknowledged. The result will certainly appeal more to submarine buffs—it does look and feel a lot like other submarine movies (starting with K-19 The Widowmaker), and the limited production values are somewhat offset by good actors and a script that places some emphasis on plausibility. As a submarine film, Hostile Waters is overshadowed by more illustrious theatrically released films, but it holds its own decently enough.

  • The Prodigy (2019)

    The Prodigy (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) I’m not a big fan of the bad-seed horror genre, and becoming a parent has done nothing to improve my opinion of the subgenre. The Prodigy brings very few new ideas to the table, although relying so much on ideas of reincarnation and the possibility, however fleeting, that there may be a cure for the bad child does give the story something extra to play with. Unfortunately, where The Prodigy fails is in giving us a reason to care. Focused almost entirely on the monster it has created, it seems uninterested in having anyone else to care about. The mom protagonist is barely sketched; the father is taken out of the film as quickly as he can, and even the psychologist (Colm Feore, wasted in a middling role) is better used as a puppet to bat around. Much of the execution is strictly routine, with faded colours, intrusive musical cues, and showy direction that, alas, only plays into solidly established genre techniques. By the time the bleak ending comes around, it’s more disappointing than anything else—not only is the film not giving us any chance to care, it ultimately doesn’t even give us a reason to care since the dice is loaded for a depressing ending. In making itself so dark, The Prodigy also found a way to make itself easily ignored.

  • Le violon rouge [The Red Violin] (1998)

    Le violon rouge [The Red Violin] (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2018) As someone who like cinematic form experimentation, there’s no way I wasn’t going to be interested in Le Violon Rouge, a Canadian film tacking not a single character, but a single object through centuries. Here, the story begins in the late seventeenth century, as a grieving violin-maker coats a new violin with a substance of particular meaning. From that dramatic starting point, we follow the violin through Vienna (1793), Oxford (1890s), Shanghai (1960s) and Montréal (1997) as the violin changes hands, creates passions and undergoes surprising changes in fate. As a concept, it’s quite lovely—there are a lot of novels of the sort (or close to it—see the bibliography of James A. Michener and Edward Rutherfurd) but for obvious reasons it’s a much harder form to do as a film—juggling several time periods is a nightmare in itself, not to mention the added production costs. As a result, I can’t help but compare the potential of Le violon rouge with its execution and being slightly disappointed—more time periods, stronger dramatic ironies, perhaps a longer running time in the form of a miniseries could have done the best justice to the idea. Still, what we do have with the finished film in 131 minutes isn’t negligible—the editing hopping back and forth between 1997 Montréal and earlier time period is admirable enough, but writer/director François Girard’s juggling of a large cast of character and five separate languages is an amazing feat in itself. Samuel L. Jackson, Colm Feore, Sandra Oh, French-Canadian cinema fixture Remy Girard and none other than Canadian director Don McKellar (who also co-wrote the film) are only some of the names in the ensemble cast. While Le violon rouge does have flaws, it’s also quite an interesting experiment in cinema itself and does warrant a look if that’s the kind of thing that interests you.

  • Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 (2017)

    Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018) I had reasonably high hopes for this sequel to the 2009 bilingual thriller Bon Cop Bad Cop. The original was a clever look at Canada’s two linguistic communities, straddling language and culture in the service of a comic thriller. This sequel manages to get both Patrick Huard and Colm Feore to reprise their roles (no mean feat, given both actors’ busy schedules) but seems to forget much of what made the original work so well. The theme of the original film, so cleanly focused on French/English relationships, was clear and compelling—the sequel, alas, muddles along with a half-hearted look south of the border. Taking the plot to the United States is a logical step forward, but some of the America-bashing does get cheap and tiresome. The character work is fine in theory, except that we don’t particularly care about many of the secondary characters, and the film has the bad idea of giving a terminal illness to one of its protagonists, leading to one good death-wish scene but a whole lot of cumbersome emotional baggage to the film’s conclusion (not to mention a possible third film). Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 also falls prey to the easy lure of police brutality—it’s hard to cheer for nominally sympathetic and comic protagonists when they start manhandling and torturing suspects. Too long for its own good, Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 ends up feeling like a chore rather than a fun film … and given that the point of it is a fun film, the disappointment is palpable. I still like much of the film—Huard and Feore are likable, Mariana Mazza makes a remarkable (but almost overdone) appearance as a hyperactive computer specialist and some of the stunts are spectacular enough. But there is a lot of untapped or misplaced potential in the film’s execution as it loses its way, sabotages some of its own goodwill and ends up on a less than fully satisfying note.

  • The Chronicles Of Riddick (2004)

    The Chronicles Of Riddick (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2004) Oh no; here I am, twisted between a bad film and a genre I love, a ridiculous script and a director who knows what he’s doing. In some ways, this film is the epitome of dumb people’s conception of bad SF. Would I be inclined to melodramatic statements, I’d probably say something like how it “sets back the general public’s perception of SF by decades”, except that Battlefield Earth already damaged the genre’s perception for years. On the other hand, I’ve professed my admiration for David Twohy just about everywhere else, and there’s no denying that he’s attempting something very ambitious here. Too bad that it’s pure bargain-basement nonsense: despite some nifty details here and there, this movie rarely makes sense and is content to rely on tired clichés (the Furian prophecy, the easy “victory by killing the head vampire”, etc.) rather than bring forth something new. It doesn’t help that the direction is just about as original as the writing. Scientifically, it’s all trash (don’t get me started on the impossible weather patterns of Crematoria), but that hardly matters given that the film veers more often in science-fantasy territory. As such, there’s something admirable about the grandeur of the visuals: even though the film’s design is singularly ugly, it’s big and bold. Much of the same could be said for Vin Diesel, who once again turns in a serviceable return performance as bad-boy Riddick, though he’s nowhere near the impact of his turn in the prequel Pitch Black. Judi Dench and Colm Feore spend the entire movie slumming in undignified and humourless roles. Still, there’s an undeniable appeal in seeing scorched-hot Thandie Newton vamp around in a snake-tight outfit, or even Alexa Davalos do her best with the usual “tough chick” shtick. So there I am, twisted between dull directing, bad writing, a love of the genre and respect for Twohy. What’s a critic to do?

    (Second viewing, On DVD, March 2005) Some movies improve upon a second viewing and some don’t. This one not only doesn’t, but actively suffers from the supplement of information that is to be found on the DVD. Sure, some of the action sequences aren’t bad, the art direction is imaginative and Vin Diesel has a screen presence that can do much to compensate for the material. But nothing can raise the quality of the atrocious script, nor make sense of the ridiculous excuse for a science-fiction story. In fact, the more information is presented to us, the less sense the film makes. Yikes. Don’t listen to the audio commentary!