Jon Voight

  • Ray Donovan: The Movie (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) I watched just enough of the first season of Ray Donovan to be interested in the film epilogue, but clearly not enough to get the most out of it. Meant as a crash-conclusion to the series after it was unceremoniously cut short, Ray Donovan: The Movie focuses its plotting on the melodramatic family matters that got me to stop watching the series in the first place—Donovan as a Hollywood fixer is interesting, but Donovan as a man stuck between the criminal activities of his father and his highly dysfunctional family is far more ordinary. But the series made its choices seasons ago, driving Donovan cross-country back to the less sunny skies of New York City and Boston, and keeping the tension high between father and son. As this movie begins, flashbacks quickly get viewers up to speed as to the deaths, betrayals and fat stack of valuable paper driving the final confrontation. There’s both a framing device in which Donovan discusses killing his father with a therapist, and a series of flashbacks to the 1980s to explain how and why there’s such an enmity between the two. Liev Schreiber is his usual dependable self as Donovan-fils, while Jon Voight is still suitably slimy as the aged Donovan-père. The film is clearly meant for series viewers, though: little time is spent reintroducing characters or plotlines, and the stakes of the rather glum film are clearly aligned with the series rather than pump things up for broader audiences. While there’s an attempt to upgrade the directing to a feature-film quality, the results are still very much aligned with that’s commonly seen on cable TV. In other words (and unlike similar spinoff The Many Saints of Newark, riffing off The Sopranos), there’s no real reason to check out Ray Donovan: The Movie unless you’re a confirmed fan of the show looking for closure: the highlights are few, the stakes are minimal if you’re not already invested in the characters and the presentation is humdrum at best. Fans of the show will feel differently and that’s fine—everything benefits from closure even if it’s not the graceful last season the show-runners initially wanted.

  • The Champ (1979)

    The Champ (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2020) An all-time weepie heavyweight, The Champ is director Franco Zeffirelli’s melodramatic remake of the already overdramatic 1930s Oscar-winning classic, except fine-tuned to make everyone cry by the end of the film. (No, seriously—The Champ has even been used in clinical settings to prove that it’s “the saddest movie in the world”) if you’ve seen the original, you will find that Zeffirelli has added very little other than sound and colour cinematography—he’s seemingly content to run through the same motions with even more melodrama. Jon Voight stars at his puffiest as the titular champ, while Faye Dunaway preens as his ex-wife, although it’s young Ricky Schroder who becomes the centre of attention as the boy who clearly doesn’t understand the tragedy unfolding around (and about) him. The Champ isn’t particularly good if looked at dispassionately—it’s deliberately engineered to pull at heartstrings and is absolutely shameless about the way it goes about it. The question then becomes—are you able to look at it dispassionately? Because it will use every trick in the book to prevent it.

  • Varsity Blues (1999)

    Varsity Blues (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2017) Much of Varsity Blues’ first half seems to be about Texas High School football and how it drives people to do crazy things. Elevated to the rank of a local religion, high-school football as shown in the film becomes an excuse for the worst excesses, its players venerated to a dangerous level. (While I’d usually be quick to tsk-tsk the craziness of teen football worship, hockey season has reminded me that high-school hockey is just as venerated in Canada and leads to much of the same kinds of excesses chronicled here.)  It’s good material, but it was to be done much better by 2003’s Friday Night Lights. The football stuff all leads to a climactic game, the likes of which have been seen in nearly every single sports movies of the past century. Far more interesting is the other high-school movie going on at the edges of the football movie, in which various seniors contemplate their future. James Van Der Beek is likable as the protagonist, Jon Voight plays the villain remarkably well and Ali Larter owns the infamous whipped-cream bikini scene. Tonie Perensky also has a striking hot-for-teacher scene that further shows how Varsity Blues gets more interesting the farther away it gets from the football field. It ends up as a somewhat generic high-school movie, with a few highlights along the way.

  • Getaway (2013)

    Getaway (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2014) As a fan of car-chase movies, I took Getaway‘s horrible reviews with a spoonful of salt: Most B-grade action films get low grades anyway, and as we know that it’s really the action sequences that make or break these films, right? Well, it turns out that the reviewers completely understood the film: Getaway is a frustrating waste of money and talent, in the service of incompetent directing by Courtney Solomon (of Dungeons and Dragons infamy) and a near-worthless script. There’s a small comfort to find out that the film doesn’t take a long time before degenerating into nonsense: From the incoherent opening credit sequence alone, it’s obvious that this film will really not be any good. A mess of random camera angles edited with a blender, Getaway makes a blurry mush of its action sequences, wasting several dozen cars in the process: the action scenes flash on-screen with no sense of geography, continuity or excitement. (It’s not a surprise if the film’s best shot, a lengthy uninterrupted driving shot reminiscent of C’était un rendez-vous, temporarily dispenses with the two-cuts-a-second aesthetics) If the incomprehensible action is the worst of Getaway‘s, problems, don’t think it gets off any easier on the rest: Selena Gomez is completely miscast as kind of a shrill and rebellious hacker/car enthusiast: she has the aggressiveness of a kitten, and Getaway (unlike Spring Breakers) can’t even claim to have her turning against type. Ethan Hawke seems out of place here, turning the wheel and looking intensely in front of him as Jon Voight’s voice barks “Do it now!” over and over again. There’s a smidgen of interest in setting the action in Sofia, but none of it goes anywhere as the film almost trips upon itself in trying to justify why an all-American cast should be involved. All it does in underscore how unredeemable Getaway becomes. Not even a half-clever final coda can save the film. It is awful even by the generous standards of car movies, and even enthusiasts are advised to watch something else.