Wild Card: Statham Happens in Vegas

It is not exactly a critic’s dream come true, but it rises to one of our frequent challenges. We often lament studios remake classic movies, making them considerably worse, rather than redoing and hopefully improving less than great films. That sort of happens here when Jason Statham steps into a role originated by Burt Reynolds. It’s already sounding better, isn’t it? In fact, Statham is much more convincing as the lethal bodyguard with a gambling problem in Simon West’s Wild Card (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Like the somewhat notorious 1986 film Heat, Wild Card was adapted by screenwriter William Goldman from his own novel. On the screen, it follows much the same structure, but off-screen, hopefully there will be far less litigation. Nick Wild has an uneasy truce with the mafia. He stays on good terms with the mega-connected Baby, but for the most part, he does not bother them and they do not bother him. Most of his jobs are a little demeaning, like babysitting nickel-and-dime gambler Cyrus Kinnick, but he keeps hoping to hit it big at the tables and run off to Corsica (it was Venice before).

This equilibrium is disrupted when a visiting gangster brutalizes Holly, a prostitute Wild was formerly involved with. She wants him to get the creep’s name, so she can pursue legal action. However, Wild wants no part of anything connected to the Golden Nugget, which must be thrilled to be so explicitly identified as a mobster resort. Of course, as a good guy, Wild can’t help himself. Despite his hesitation, he lays quite a beating on the entitled Danny DeMarco and his henchmen and facilitates their further humiliation at Holly’s hands. From there, one thing leads to another.

Wild Card has a handful of spectacular fights (choreographed by Cory Yuen), sprinkled throughout long stretches of compulsive gambling and macho brooding. The gimmick for Wild (or Nick “Mex” Escalante as he was once known) is his facility for using commonplace items, such as credit cards and poker chips, as deadly weapons. Needless to say, this works so much better with Statham than Reynolds. Dominik García-Lorido (Andy Garcia’s daughter in the excellent Lost City and in real life) and Stanley Tucci also represent considerable upgrades as Holly and Baby, respectively. Indeed, the casting is nearly perfect this time around. Unfortunately, the Kinnick character still gums up the works with his unnecessary subplot.

Unlike the previous film’s revolving door-battery of directors, West keeps Wild Card moving along at a decent clip, even though it is more about gambling and gangster power games than action, per se. He also maintains a relatively upbeat mood, nicely underscored by some classic licensed blues and R&B tunes from artists like Magic Slim, Albert King, and Charles Brown. It still isn’t perfect but it is better, which is something. You could even say it’s not bad—but nowhere near Statham’s best work in The Bank Job and Redemption. For fans of old school Vegas, Wild Card opens this Friday (1/30) in New York.

Hollywood Horror Stories: Tales from the Script

It can be an ego-crushing way to make a lot of money. Unlike television, where writers often wield a great deal of influence, screenwriters are pretty much at the bottom of the food chain in the movie business. Yes, some scripts are sold for major green, but those are hardly the norm. Indeed, some of the most successful screenwriters in the business have stories of rejection and professional angst to share in Peter Hanson’s Tales from the Script (trailer here), which opens Friday in New York.

Every cliché about screenwriting is true. Screenwriters print their words on the page and then the project is completely out of their hands. Decent scripts get sabotaged every day through the rewriting process. Conversely, many writers performing emergency re-writes do not get proper credit for saving problematic scripts.

Tied-into Hanson’s book of the same title co-edited with his co-producer Paul Robert Herman, Script draws from a wide talent pool of screenwriters. Probably, the best known interview subjects are William Goldman (whose credits include All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Princess Bride, based on his own novel) and Paul Schrader (who penned classics like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull). Arguably, the elder statesman of the film is the late Mel Shavelson, the writer-director of Cast a Giant Shadow, the classic drama of the founding of the State of Israel. However, the best war story probably comes from Guinevere Turner from her experience writing the first draft of BloodRayne for Uwe Boll, which will not surprise anyone familiar with Boll and the train-wrecks he calls films.

Filmed in a straight-forward talking head interview format (with some cheesy infomercial music in the background), Script is hardly breaks any new cinematic ground. That hardly matters though, because so many of the stories are truly memorable. Some are funny, like Turner’s experience on Boll’s notorious bomb, whereas Bruce Joel Rubin experience with his film My Life is actually kind of touching. While many of the interviews emphasize the time and effort a serious screenwriting career requires, most are refreshingly self-aware enough to also concede it is a far easier way to earn a living than digging ditches, or other such real work.

Most Script’s participating screenwriters are eloquent enough to convince audiences that when a movie blows, it is probably not the writer’s fault. It is a likable valentine to writers and the writing process, but not necessarily to Hollywood. While it might be stylistically conventional, Script has a nice heart. It opens Friday (3/12) in New York at the Quad Cinema.