Homefront (2013) - Review

Let's start with this: Arnold, Sly, and the rest of the guys really didn't make movies any better than the action stuff done today.

I know, I know, that's heresy. 

Let me take a step back to say that nothing I see today is as fun to me as the stuff I grew up watching when Arnold and Sly ruled Hollywood. Just because I love Commando, however, doesn't make that movie high art - or even well edited. I'm able to love Commando for its cheesiness, its fun, its charismatic lead actor, and, most of all, the fact that when I watch it I can pretend to be a kid watching bad guys versus good guys all over again. It isn't so much that Hollywood makes worse mid/high-budget action star bonanzas than they did way back when; it's that they seem to make less of them and so, just by volume, there are fewer fun ones to bank on.

I clear my throat with all of that for an obvious reason: I'm reviewing a Jason Statham film. One written by Sylvester Stallone! 

Statham action movies are almost all poorly reviewed, and it seems like every time one of them comes out critics bemoan that he'll never be as good as Arnold or Sly - forgetting that critics of the 1980s mostly reviled Arnold and Sly. But Statham is just about the only one consistently churning out mid/high-budget old-fashioned action movies these days (unless you plan to credit the cast of the Fast & Furious franchise with their annual output). 

Statham movies - well, let me be clear this Statham movie in particular - are cheesy, usually kind of fun, and little more than good guys blowing up bad guys - just like the movies from 30 years ago. And that makes this enjoyable entertainment, as low-brow as I acknowledge it to be. 30 years from now, critics are going to bash films because they don't live up to what Jason was doing back in the good old days. It won't be because this stuff is great filmmaking, but because it is entertaining and fun, in spite of the violence and general lack of morality.

That's not to say Homefront is great - or even the best Statham has done in the past three years (that would probably be Safe, but to be honest I haven't seen them all -- the guy pops out like five a year of these things). But it certainly isn't the worst Statham movie I've seen recently, by a longshot (that would be Expendables 2). It is, in the end, fairly passable entertainment, filled with good guys blowing up bad guys and mostly doing so without racism or trying to live up to some fascist mindset (small-town Louisianans may feel a little stung, though). And, by American movie standards, it actually kind of underplays the gun stuff.

However you feel about guns, the problem is they've been a bit played out in movies. When I see a bunch of guys in a movie carrying machine guns now, I can only hope the director realizes that there's almost nothing that can be done with a machine gun shootout scene that wasn't done in the 1980s, and hope that the director finds a reasonably plausible way to get things back to more interesting footing. In Homefront, director Gary Fleder mostly underplays the scenes involving guns - notably save for the opening scene, which is in gun overkill mode - and focuses on hand-to-hand combat and some psychological beefing between Statham and the baddies in this one. 

There isn't much logic to the film at any point. But I guess I still should summarize the plot.

Statham plays a former DEA agent (or is it INTERPOL, or is it military - Clancy Brown delivers an amusing joke on that issue) laying low after he brings down a biker gang in the film's silly opening scene. Only he, for some stupid reason, chooses to lay low in the same state where that biker gang operates. He heads to small town Louisiana and soon enough his 9 year old daughter and he are bloodying noses and starting feuds with the local rednecks/meth addicts - led, oddly, by Kate Bosworth.

Bosworth goes to her brother, top meth dealer in the area, played by....James Franco? Whose meth-addicted, trashy, kinda girlfriend is played by...Winona Ryder? Interesting casting in this one. 

Franco, playing a character known as Gator (I sadly did not see any overt nod to Burt Reynolds here), tries to lean on Statham, only to learn of Statham's past. So Gator calls his old biker gang pals and tries to cut a deal to trade Statham for some help distributing his meth. Chaos and murder ensue. 

There's nothing new here. Nothing particularly off-the-wall to provide a nice hook. While one would expect this particular group of actors to be having some fun with the material, they seem to be playing it, perhaps unfortunately, pretty straight. Fleder doesn't try much other than to put together a journeyman's package of solidly done technical work. So there really isn't much here that surprises or does anything to advance the genre.

And yet it is still fun. Because it is fully coherent, even if not logical. And because Statham, while pretty much stuck in one expression and tone for the entire film, has the right physicality for the role. And because it is, I admit, kind of funny, even if they play it straight, seeing Franco trying to play a bayou badass and Ryder trying to play a white trash meth-head. There are some missed opportunities - the opening scene is bad, Fleder way underplays the destruction of Franco's dream lab, and there isn't nearly enough direct interaction between Franco and Statham.

In the end, however, there's still enough of the little kid in me that can still enjoy an old-fashioned good guys vs bad guys violent showdown. This hits that spot. Don't expect to remember much about this film in a week, but for the two hours you'll spend with the film, it's entertaining enough.

Screened on Blu-Ray.