Financial Times (London,England)

November 21, 1991, Thursday

Manly pursuits

STEPHEN AMIDON

THE TWO JAKES (15) ICA

POINT BREAK (15) Odeon High Street Kensington

K2 (15) Cannons West End

HANGIN’ WITH THE HOMEBOYS (15) Cannon Shaftesbury Avenue SWITCH (15) Odeon West End

AMA (15) Renoir

From the moment he donned his football helmet and spoke of a lost America in Easy Rider right up to his show-stealing performance in Batman, Jack Nicholson has time after time proved himself uniquely adept at rescuing films. With The Two Jakes, he does it again, giving his most subtly mature performance to date. The difference here is that the director he is bailing out is himself. The Two Jakes is a sequel to Roman Polanski’s masterful Chinatown, with Nicholson reprising his role as the cynical yet sensitive private eye Jake Gittes, and Robert Towne once again providing the script. The action takes place a decade after Chinatown’s tragic finale, in which Gittes’s true love was killed after the truth about her incestuous relationship with her father was revealed. Gittes, fleshier, richer, yet still working adultery cases, finds himself once again drawn into a vortex of secrets and betrayal, this time involving land which just might belong to his dead love’s illegitimate daughter. Haunted by memories, Gittes soon finds himself breaking every rule of the private eye’s rulebook as he tries to rescue the girl. It is a fundamentally strong story, though it lacks the ingenious nuances and twists of Towne’s earlier effort. There are good performances throughout, most notably Harvey Keitel as the other Jake, a rich land developer who kills his wife’s lover, and Richard Farnsworth as a conniving oil baron. But it is Nicholson who is especially superb, giving a performance of wistful restraint that stands in sharp contrast to the sly, self-satisfied work that seemed in danger of hijacking his middle age. Where the film proves lacking is in its plodding pace, brought on partly by Nicholson’s too careful direction, but also by Towne’s inability to find a dynamic to fuel his elaborate plot the way the theme of illicit love kept you glued to your seat during Chinatown. It is all too static and stately, bordering at times even on tedium. You can feel the absence of Roman Polanski’s deft hand, especially in the more emotionally pitched scenes. Nicholson the director seems to have forgotten what Nicholson the actor knows in every bone in his body – that above all it’s a motion picture he’s making. There’s nothing tedious about Point Break, the story of a boyish FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) who goes undercover at the California beach in order to investigate a gang of surfing bank robbers led by a mysterious character named Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). It is all action from the opening credits, with Reeves and Swayze playing cat and mouse through a series of manly pursuits that include night time surfing and freefall parachuting. There are also plenty of fistfights, shootouts and car chases as well, all accompanied a ringing rock soundtrack that should appeal to anyone who believes that the boyish Reeves would actually qualify as a field agent for the FBI. The film ventures onto less certain ground when it attempts to explore the dangerous ties that bind Reeves and Swayze, positing but not really making credible a kind of male bonding that thrives off risk and death. And Bodhi’s Zen warrior ethos sounds like a load of West Coast nonsense when he says things like “if you want the ultimate rush, you have to be willing to pay the ultimate prices.” Although this is a film that claims to be about adrenaline, it really has a lot more to do with testosterone. There is also plenty of machismo about in K2, the story of two friends who try to climb the world’s toughest mountain. Harold (Matt Craven) and Taylor (Michael Biehn) are Seattle yuppies who drive nice cars, attract lovely women and have great jobs. But it is just not enough, so they recreate by climbing perilous cliffs. When the chance to conquer the world’s second highest peak comes along, it is an offer neither can refuse, even though Harold’s long-suffering wife threatens to leave him if he goes. Their ascent turns out to be anything but easy, fraught with conflicts within the six-person climbing party, trouble with the Pakistani porters, unpredictable weather and, most tellingly, the mountain itself, which kills climbers with alarming regularity. Eventually, just Taylor and Harold are left to try for the summit, discovering something about themselves and their friendship on the way. As an action picture, K2 holds up pretty well, providing some dizzying moments as the climbers swing across rock faces or negotiate icy walls. It is when director Franc Roddam and writer Patrick Meyers try to deepen the characters and say something about male bonding that the story plummets. For no matter how much the filmmakers try to provide rationales for this dangerous endeavour, our heroes remain nothing more than a couple of self-obsessed, reckless boys out for a big thrill. At one point Harold, a physicist, claims he climbs mountains because nobody’s discovered a Unified Field Theory. And when, at their most perilous moment, Taylor starts making a speech about how he wants to live with nobility, you cannot but hope that his ponderous words will start an avalanche that will kick start this film back into the action flick it should be. One film that does have much of value to say about male friendship is Hangin’ with the Homeboys, a delightful small budget gem from writer/director Joseph B. Vasquez. The film depicts one night in the life of four South Bronx buddies, two Puerto Rican, two black, as they drive around the neighbourhood looking for fun. Nothing much happens – there are no drugs, no gang related violence, no big statements about ghetto deprivation. Rather, Vasquez and his supremely talented cast of newcomers (led by the hilarious Doug E. Doug) focus on the subtle pressures at work on young men trying to come of age in a often faceless town. It is a funny, honest and often very touching account of the give-and-take of male relationships which puts to shame the multimillion dollar explorations of the same subject mentioned above. Male bonding of a different sort is the issue in Blake Edwards’ Switch, which tells the story of Steve Brooks, an obnoxiously chauvinist advertising executive who is reincarnated as a woman after being murdered by a consortium of jilted ex-lovers. Our hero, now Amanda Brooks (Ellen Barkin), is given the task of finding one woman who liked her when she was a he in order to keep from going to Hell. Much self-examination and redefinition on Brooks’s part ensues, culminating in the rather alarming news that she is going to have a child. It is an idea pregnant with possibility for mischief and insight, and for the first part of the movie it appears Edwards might be about to deliver. Barkin has a good stab at playing a man-in-a-woman’s body, with her loose-limbed gait, husky voice and leering expression. And Edwards sets up some tantalising scenarios, such as when Barkin tries to seduce a lesbian. But before long the whole thing degenerates into lame farce, with plenty of groin kicks, haymaking punches and a ridiculously overworked set-piece in which Barkin falls off high heels. Ama is an often engaging debut by the Ghanaian filmmakers Kwate Nee-Owoo and Kwesi Owusu that tells the story of a spiritually gifted twelve-year-old (wonderfully played by Georgina Ackerman) torn between her traditional Ghanaian roots and her present life in North London. When she slots an ancestral medallion into a computer at the place her mother works as a cleaner, dark prophecies about her boxer brother and asthmatic father appear on the screen, putting Ama into the familiar predicament of the wise youngster who must try to warn the ignorant adults of impending doom. There is much to admire here, although in the end it is a shame Nee-Owoo and Owusu did not stick closer to this storyline instead of letting the film degenerate into a loose portrait of London immigrant life.