Movies for Grownups

Reign Over Me & Shooter

Both Rated R

originally published March 28, 2007

Adults, hear my plea. If you’re tired of emotionally immature comedies and computer-generated kiddie movies, you must venture out amongst the unwashed masses of moviegoers. Like the responsible, mature grownups you are, brave the hordes still chuckling at Norbitand Wild Hogs(I’m sure more than a few of you were suckered into that aged yukless-fest) in order to make box office hits of Reign Over Meand Shooter, two imperfect but unapologetically adult (you know what I mean; get your mind out of the gutter) life rafts in a sea of raging childishness. If you don’t support cinema fashioned for someone whose biggest problems are dependents and empty nests - not prom dates and barhopping - we’ll just be watching Son of Norbitand TMNT IInext March. Reign Over Me, written and directed by Mike Binder ( The Upside of Anger), is paced like Heinz ketchup - thick and slow, but worth the wait. Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) is a successful dentist with a beautiful, micro-managing wife (a superb Jada Pinkett Smith) and two little girls. Like Chris Rock’s Richard Cooper in I Think I Love My Wife, Alan is bored with his life. Unlike Rock’s Cooper, Alan was blessed with the mature mind of a married man. Rather than seeking solace in the arms of another woman - an option the film makes clearly available to Alan - the mild-mannered D.D.S. runs into his old college roommate, Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler). Charlie has been unreachable - figuratively and literally - since the deaths of his wife and three daughters on 9/11. (For those potential audience members turned off by the devastating 9/11 connection, know that it’s tough but not a deal-breaker.) Fortunately for Alan, Charlie opens the door to his closely guarded apartment and his life. With his foot firmly in the door, Alan forces his way in and Charlie out to receive help from a beautiful, young psychiatrist (Liv Tyler).

Adam Sandler and Liv Tyler

Binder piles on the clumsy drama of real life - lawsuits and loss - and he still retains too much of the dirty male mind that sank his admirable if not likable HBO series, “The Mind of the Married Man.” However, he’s provided Cheadle with exactly the breakout comedic-dramatic performance this undersold star needs. With African-American actors such as Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker receiving accolades on a yearly basis, it is high time Cheadle got more than the customary acknowledgment of his unfailing ability to enrich every single film he is in, be it a fluff piece ( Ocean’s 11) or a not-heavy-enough docudrama ( Hotel Rwanda). I realize superb, understated character actors who don’t gobble scenery like Washington (seriously, we knock Pacino for it all the time, but let Denzel get away with it in inferior films) rarely transform into matinee idols (of which Denzel might be today’s best), but Reignproves Cheadle capable and ready to make the jump. Cheadle’s simple, quiet reactions (the hardest part of acting) to his costar’s misguidedly laughable readings of painfully serious dialogue is doubly as powerful as the showy Sandler, whose idea of stretching means playing a serious angry man-child as opposed to an idiotic angry man-child (his Charlie is solidly built but not award-worthy as many will claim). Reign Over Memay be slow going and the resolution too simplistic, but the reign of Don Cheadle, acting his heart out in a film that will be forgotten by next January’s Oscar nominations, will not be ending anytime soon. (Note: If anyone recalls Charlie’s last words to Doreen, as recounted to Alan at the Chinese restaurant, please leave a web comment below. At the screening I attended, the sound humorously dropped out for that crucial phrase and that crucial phrase alone.)

Mark Wahlberg

If Reign Over Mewas the overemotional drama kid from high school, Shooter, the latest bullet-riddled, explosion festival from Training Daydirector Antoine Fuqua, is the burnout with whom the drama kid will connect at the 10-year reunion after both have settled down to raise a family. Neither film is old enough to want to hang out with Wild Hogs, but 300is still too much of a partier for these two family men. With so many comic book heroes beefing up the silver screen, it’s high time a good old-fashioned literary hero like Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger got his shot. (Okay, Hunter’s no Dickens and Swagger’s not even Jason Bourne, but with today’s illiterati calling the box office shots, Swagger’s more than we can hope for now that the ticket sales of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan have become more busto than boffo.) Fuqua keeps the two-hour Shootermoving at a quick clip as Swagger (Mark Wahlberg, incomprehensibly mumbling a good one-third of his lines), falsely implicated in an attempt on the president’s life, uses bullets and bombs to clear his name. On the run from freelance, neo-con mercs (led by Danny Glover in a rare instance of overacting), Swagger gets an assist from a green FBI agent (Crash’s Michael Peña) and his dead spotter’s hottie (We Are Marshall’s Kate Mara). I’ve never been one to question an action film’s serendipitous plotting, but Shooterspreads my disbelief thin as a contestant on “America’s Next Top Model.” Nonetheless, I’ll take the flick’s '80s experienced, no frills action - and Reign Over Me’s domesticated troubles - over faded comedians in fat suits and over-the-hill B-listers on bikes, any day.

Drew Wheeler