A Bloody Mess

Steer clear of these

Mark Holcomb

Harsh Times

Scorsese imitation is apparently the sincerest form of the early fall movie season, what with Dito Montiel's decent A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and now this testosterone-pumped entry from screenwriter-director David Ayer. But with the body count, carsick-making palette and pace and social conscience of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Harsh Times is no Mean Streets—or even the Ayer-scripted Training Day, for that matter.

Reportedly drawn from the newly minted auteur's own post-military-service experience, the film follows first-class f--kups Jim (Christian Bale) and Mike (Six Feet Under's Freddy Rodriguez) as they wander through East and South Central Los Angeles and later Mexico in search of drugs, hooch and easy sex—anything but work. Jim, a hair-trigger psychopath and ex-Army Ranger, is biding his time before landing a hoped-for career in law enforcement, while Mike only wants to keep his live-in girlfriend (Eva Longoria in a thanklessly shrewish role) off his back. The narrative aimlessness is engaging enough after you get the hang of the coked-up-Angeleno patois, but Harsh Times begins to resemble those unidimensional corporate-paranoia flicks from the '90s once the increasingly loony Jim nabs an interview with—oh, brother—the Department of Homeland Security. It's all downhill from there, as Ayer tries mightily to milk meaning from and score relevancy points with Jim's Iraq War-induced dementia; suffice it to say that bullets fly, blood sprays and few salient sociopolitical connections are made.

What is it about violent crime that continues to draw fledgling filmmakers, anyway? It seems a kind of ascetic conceit—suffering as a means to spiritual growth, to say nothing of Hollywood gravitas. But without an awareness that it's just that (à la the funny Catholic confessional bits in Scorsese's 1973 template) or some deeply personal attachment to the characters (as in Montiel's autobiographical film), the gunplay and tortured machismo come off as hollow posturing. To that end, Harsh Times' performances couldn't be more over the top. Rodriguez pulls off the Beavis to Bale's Butt-Head rather well, although it's hard to imagine his wan sensitivity serving him well on any city's mean streets, much less with Longoria. Bale, however, largely misfires as Jim: He approximates the SoCal working-class bluster well enough, if sporadically, but once he gets revved up in the movie's second act, his ranting becomes tiresome and distracting. It's an exhausting performance that provides little insight into the seductiveness of psychos, and Bale may just be too smart and introspective a guy to pull this character off (although it's pretty easy to imagine his Jim as one of the LAPD's, er, finest).

Also, while Ayer deserves credit for setting the film in LA's fringe neighborhoods rather than in its oft-filmed locales, the result is strangely placeless; unlike more effectively decentralized Los Angeles movies such as Jackie Brown, Collateral and even Million Dollar Baby, Harsh Times could've been shot (and taken place) in Toronto. It's unfair to compare the movie to its predecessors and contemporaries too thoroughly, though; Harsh Times has its own fleeting merits (the Mexico footage is intriguing), and first-timer Ayer may well have a subtler, better-thought-out movie in him. He mortgaged his house and got snookered by a shady French businessman to finance this one, so he could use a break. But it remains to be seen whether he can pull his nose out of the gutter—or the cinematic canon—for his next go-round.

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