Cate Blanchett stars as the real-life Irish journalist who paid the ultimate price for exposing the burgeoning drug problem in mid-90s Dublin. Outraged after discovering children playing in streets littered with used needles, Veronica Guerin decided to bring the epidemic into the national limelight, risking the life and safety of not only herself but her family as well. Blanchett, always reliable, does a great job portraying Guerin as a woman with a brave public face, even after a shot is fired into her home and a drug lord punches her repeatedly in the face for daring to step foot on his property (the film’s most brutal and disturbing scene).
Jim Carrey stars as a man who discovers a book that he believes is about him, sinking him further and further into a murder mystery that proposes the killer is, quite literally, the number 23. Carrey is good and director Joel Schumacher’s (A Time to Kill, Flatliners) direction is taut, if a little too hyper-stylized for the material. I don’t put stock in numerology, so the first half of the film strains my suspension of disbelief. Fortunately, Fernley Phillips’ script makes a one-eighty after the mid-point and I found the last half much more engaging than the first. (I won’t give any direct spoilers, but it’s a lot like A Beautiful Mind in its narrative structure.) Cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) serves up high-contrast lighting and a palette of deep colors to reinforce Schumacher’s melancholy tone, while Harry Gregson-Williams’ score plays counterpoint, adding a sense of wonder and urgency.
The public will never let director Joel Schumacher live down his Batman movies, but let’s not forget that before there were nipples on the Batsuit, there was The Lost Boys. A divorced mother brings her two sons to a coastal California town to live with their grandfather and make a new life for themselves. There’s just one problem. The whole town is prey for a gang of vampires!
