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Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. This needs to stop. In Body of Lies, Russell Crowe once again pulls out his oldest gimmick: The Contrarian Detail. Again and again, Crowe plays tough guys — and tries to humanize them with some too poetic, too cute detail, to ridiculous, distracting effect. His Black Bart cowboy had a taste for painting in 3:10 to Yuma (remember him sketching the sagebrush in between gunfights?). His fearless sea captain had a fine hand with the violin in Master and Commander (how’d he keep that thing in tune?). And now, like his sensitive divorced dad–tough cop in American Gangster, his absurdly evil, Rumsfeldian CIA mastermind in Body of Lies is a magnet for soccer-dad clichés, ferrying his kids back and forth to school while plotting assassinations on his cell phone. After breaking through with coherent,... [read full story]
