The other night I was channel surfing and I stopped for a few minutes on TCM\u2019s screening of \u201cFriedkin Uncut.\u201d A picture I\u2019d enjoyed, and reviewed in another venue, and made for pleasant revisiting while I was killing a little time. I saw the section where Quentin Tarantino reflected on the axiom that casting was 90 percent of filmmaking. He said maybe that\u2019s not true. But that maybe 80 percent was true.<\/p>\n
I thought of this idea a little time later while watching a new film directed by Philip Noyce, from a script by Richard Wenk, adapting a novel by Victor Gischler. The scenario of \u201cFast Charlie\u201d treads on some very well-worn turf. To wit, a mob fixer toying with retirement is compelled to deal with some criminal reorganization that is quite likely to put him out of commission in a way he won\u2019t like. The (spoiler alert: correct) presumption when faced with this kind of genre situation is to figure that the mob fixer, in this case indeed the title character Fast Charlie, is resourceful and ruthless enough to outwit and outgun his way through his dilemmas. <\/p>\n
In this case, familiarity will not necessarily breed contempt so much as pleasure, and a lot of that has to do with, yup, casting. Pierce Brosnan plays the Biloxi-based mob operative Charlie Swift, and he puts on a Southern accent broader than the Mississippi River at its widest, and he makes you love it. At the movie\u2019s opening, he\u2019s in a junkyard, being ordered to strip, and he relates in voiceover:\u201d I always thought my life would end like this, in some godforsaken place, from a bullet I didn\u2019t see coming. But I never thought I\u2019d care.\u201d What follows tells us why he came to care. <\/p>\n
It came thusly: Taking out a guy named Rollo, at the behest of a couple of his bosses, Sol and Stan, who are trying to help out a young up-and-comer named Beggar. On this job Charlie\u2019s working with a youngster himself, nicknamed \u201cBlade\u201d on account of his favored tool, although a turn of events has Charlie re-nicknaming the kid \u201cDonut,\u201d which he doesn\u2019t like. The results of the hit compel Charlie to visit Rollo\u2019s ex, a fetching taxidermist named Marcie; her portrayer is the slyly winning Morena Baccarin. <\/p>\n
Charlie\u2019s crew is pretty down-home as criminals go. As a matter of fact, Charlie\u2019s immediate boss, Stan, suffers from Alzheimer\u2019s, and Charlie devotedly looks after him. Stan is played by James Caan in his last film role, and he\u2019s poignant and charming. New trouble begins brewing when the ambitious Beggar requests a meet with Stan, and on being turned down, stages a bloody criminal coup. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve not read the book upon which this movie is based but judging from the dialogue, it\u2019s in the Elmore-Leonard\/Carl Hiassen mode of dryly funny mayhem. At one point in the movie, Brosnan\u2019s character gifts Baccarin\u2019s with a dead fox to stuff. She asks its name. \u201cRocky,\u201d he responds. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other night I was channel surfing and I stopped for a few minutes on TCM\u2019s screening of \u201cFriedkin Uncut.\u201d A picture I\u2019d enjoyed, and reviewed in another venue, and made for pleasant revisiting while I was killing a little time. I saw the section where Quentin Tarantino reflected on the axiom that casting was …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,37],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}