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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★★☆☆☆ 2 December 2013
This article is a review of HOMEFRONT.
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“What ever you’re thinking, re-think it,” Phil Broker (Jason Statham)
HOMEFRONT is so random. It’s as if cast and crew were pulled out of a hat, and those elements told to come up with a movie. Firstly, we have Sylvester Stallone writing the screenplay adaptation of a novel, then Gary Fleder director of THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD behind the megaphone, and then the actors: Statham, James Franco, Winona Ryder and Kate Bosworth.
Ryder and Bosworth are unflatteringly cast as drug addict skanks. It’s hard to make them come across as dowdy. The fact that the adult women in this film are either a pretty young frothy school psychologist or ladies of loose virtue might perhaps suggest something unfeminist? Also, a backwater school for under 12s has an in-house psychologist? Then you’ve got Franco as the baddie. What? In 2013 he has directed a trio of absolute stinkers (INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR, CHILD OF GOD and AS I LAY DAYING); they maybe scarily awful, though he is not. Not only that, it’s the second time he’s playing a crystal meth drug lord. Here called Gator Bodine, and previously in the (criminally underrated) GREEN HORNET as the far better monikered Danny Crystal Cleer.
HOMEFRONT is so random. It’s as if cast and crew were pulled out of a hat, and those elements told to come up with a movie. Firstly, we have Sylvester Stallone writing the screenplay adaptation of a novel, then Gary Fleder director of THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD behind the megaphone, and then the actors: Statham, James Franco, Winona Ryder and Kate Bosworth.
Ryder and Bosworth are unflatteringly cast as drug addict skanks. It’s hard to make them come across as dowdy. The fact that the adult women in this film are either a pretty young frothy school psychologist or ladies of loose virtue might perhaps suggest something unfeminist? Also, a backwater school for under 12s has an in-house psychologist? Then you’ve got Franco as the baddie. What? In 2013 he has directed a trio of absolute stinkers (INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR, CHILD OF GOD and AS I LAY DAYING); they maybe scarily awful, though he is not. Not only that, it’s the second time he’s playing a crystal meth drug lord. Here called Gator Bodine, and previously in the (criminally underrated) GREEN HORNET as the far better monikered Danny Crystal Cleer.
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Opening on under-cover cop Broker (Statham), he has infiltrated a SONS OF ANARCHY-style bike gang dealing in illegal narcotics. The police raid goes wrong and the leader’s son is killed. No dissection of the aftermath; cut to Broker with his daughter setting up home in a palatial rural idyll. (What’s he do for a living now?) A widower, and like in SAFE, the Stathe has to protect a young girl, this time his daughter Maddy (Izabela Vidovic). She is bullied on the first day of school. Well a boy tries to. Maddy has been taught some self-defence skills from her badass father. Only thing is, the bully is the daughter of Cassie Bodine (Bosworth), you guessed it… the sister of local immoral kingpin Gator. Cassie sends her husband and Gator sends some goons, sequentially, to rough him up. For all the other famous names, we are in Jason Statham land, and he puts the thugs in a hurt locker of course, escalating the feud.
More bad guys, more coincidences, more silliness mount. All semblance of seriousness disappears. And B-movie fisticuffs become the order of the day. Any time crystal meth is mentioned, the mind automatically segues to the sublime BREAKING BAD; and no one wants to go up against that behemoth. Ultimately HOMEFRONT is a retro morality tale about confronting bullies by beating them to a pulp (with a modicum of reluctance).
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