“I swear! I’m American!”
There is a law of nature that says that if you are American, you will hardly be able to play English at the cinema, but if you are English they will make you play a lot of Americans. Few actors have dared to break this rule – Robert Downey Jr., Emma Stone – with mixed results. Generally, English people find it easier to do an American accent than the other way around, or maybe it’s just bullshit spread by Her Majesty’s subjects, notoriously meticulous about the language invented by their proud ancestors who drank tea with milk. Also because, upon closer inspection, not all British actors do well with American accents: more simply, there are actors who are good with accents and others who are not. Pierce Brosnan is among the latter. Pierce Brosnan trying to be a Biloxi native is like a guy in a tuxedo sipping a cocktail at a Derozer concert: You feel something is wrong, even if you don’t know the culture or the language.
Because, beyond the accent, Pierce Brosnan has a look that only works well in certain contexts, e.g Fast Charlie it’s not one of them. The film is directed by Phillip Noyce, director of 10 am: flat calm, Power games And Under the sign of dangerlately reduced to making desperate attempts to launch young adult sagas (The Giver) and TV series. The screenplay is written by Richard Wenk, screenwriter of the saga The Equalizer. And here my brain has already exploded: Fast Charlie is based on A NOVEL, written by Victor Gischler. I don’t know who he is (and I now discover that he has written cycles of The Punisher), but it doesn’t surprise me: drawing a film from a novel should at least be synonymous with a certain dignity, but here it is as if they had decided to adapt a detective story found attached to Today on the newsstand of any seaside resort. In Fast Charlie there is NOTHING original, a little-explored narrative angle, a new point of view, a shred of idea that elevates it, even if for five minutes, from the mass of identical products.
“Noyce!”
But maybe it’s the adaptation’s fault, let’s give poor Victor Gischler the benefit of the doubt. After all, Richard Wenk is certainly not the smartest of the litter, considering that he also gave us the remake of The Magnificent 7 and the kebab as a typical dish of the Amalfi coast. But at this point let’s distribute the blame: I don’t know exactly what motivated Phillip Noyce to direct this film, but whatever it was it faded after a very short time, because here there is clearly not a residue of joy in what he does.
The plot! “Fast” Charlie Swift (clever: “swift” is a synonym for “fast”) is the most classic of fixer and has worked all his life for Stan Mullen (the great James Caan in his last role), affectionate and wise crime boss of Biloxi (can’t you also smell the mafia of the past? The one with a moral code, which does not he deals drugs but only kills people who deserve it? What good people are the mafiosi of the past, not like these ugly new generations), now suffering from dementia. Charlie takes care of him like a devoted son and continues to solve for him the small problems that a poor local boss faces on a daily basis. When a rival boss makes a clean sweep of the friendly gang of Gascons in Stan’s service, a crazy and happy mafia family, simple people who just wanted to be criminals in peace, Charlie has no choice but to ally himself with the ex-wife of a gangster who he killed (Morena Baccarin, always be praised) to avenge the massacre of the innocents.
Great actor in a humiliating role.
I told you the plot. I don’t always do it, but this time, I admit, it was necessary to reach the minimum number of jokes, because other than that there’s not much to say about Fast Charlie. It’s a listless and boring film, but to be honest I had a bit of hope in the first act: beyond a pure DTV incipit, with a in medias res over-seen and without any particular directorial flair (the film begins with a shot of Pierce Brosnan lost in a landfill, in American shot, with the horizon halfway as John Ford told Spielberg never to do), Fast Charlie strikes a perhaps involuntarily comical/surreal tone when it introduces the aforementioned mafia family while celebrating the boss’s birthday, in a desperate attempt to evoke atmospheres The Sopranos, and if nothing else there’s Pierce Brosnan who, despite remaining a fish out of water, tries to infuse his character with some gravitas. Then there is the “tender” (I hope it’s the right word, I had to look it up on Treccani) love story between Charlie and Marcie, who meet in the most unlikely situation and yet like each other immediately. It’s a shame that the film then decides to castrate any sexual impulse and not show, not even a few centimeters of skin, but not even a harmless kiss: Brosnan and Baccarin spend all their time make us understand in words how much they get along, and in the end (SPOILER?) they retreat together to a villa in the Tuscan countryside, but without even touching each other for three seconds. The good thing is that Noyce is very keen on this elderly fixer who doesn’t think it’s true that he can have a hot slut who’s much younger than him – and that she’s even into it! All this serves to present Charlie to us as a human being who, beyond his infallibility as a killer, is fragile and insecure. But if you don’t get to the point, he flows into a territory of platonic affections between repressed sexual attraction and father-daughter relationships that makes me shudder just thinking about it.
Other than that, a couple of well-done deaths and a hint of decent humor, Fast Charlie it’s a perpetual gray area of mediocrity: Charlie, as we were saying, is an infallible killer, always one step ahead of everyone, which drains the tension from any action scene. You will tell me: “Yes, but John Wick is infallible too!”. True, but at least there are martial arts there, here we are more in classic hard boiled territory and, if you present me with an elderly and on paper fallible protagonist, then you can’t make him the only intelligent and capable person in a universe of henchmen no brain. A classic rule of action is that the opponent must necessarily be more powerful than the hero, otherwise what’s the point? There isn’t a single opponent here who can stand up to or truly scare Charlie. And, even when the hour of revenge strikes, everything ends up in a boring stalemate without the slightest bloodshed.
“They call me Fast Charlie.” “Mainagioia!”
There’s no cuteness, there’s not much violence (there’s more at the beginning than at the end, the ultimate cardinal sin for this type of film), there’s no joy, and when I arrived I didn’t even see the large parking lot in Biloxi, Mississippi. It’s not that Fast Charlie Is it just a money laundering operation? This would at least explain the positive image of the mafiosi that the film desperately tries to sell us.
Unieuro shares:
“Enough! This cinema is unsatisfactory.”
George Rohmer, i400Calci.com
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