Director’s Spotlight: DJ Caruso
By Joshua Pasch
June 16, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Two For The Money
On paper, Two For The Money probably sounded great. Hollywood often tries to pitch audiences on ideas that seem fantastic in theory but that are difficult to execute. “Imagine the Godfather meets the Matrix” is one that I’ve heard recently used to describe the highly anticipated Inception. Agents and producers almost certainly sold the idea for Crank as: “it’s like the movie Speed but this time it’s a person, not a bus.” And it isn’t hard to imagine how the pitch went for Two For The Money. “Think the high stakes world of money (Boiler Room or Wall Street) and mesh that with the dramatic world of sports (probably Jerry Maguire).”
In Two For The Money, Matthew McConaughey plays former college-QB Brandon Lang. Lang has a bum knee and pipe dreams of returning to the NFL. As a day job he makes betting picks for radio listeners. Apparently, Lang is so good with his selections that it isn’t long before an overly theatrical Al Pacino comes calling to recruit his services. Pacino runs a legal operation of sleazy salesmen who solicit deep-pocketed, gambling-addicted yuppies to take their betting advice for a 10% fee. It seems win-win at first, with Pacino & Co. only getting a cut when they give winning advice. Apparently things go awry and the stakes get high when Lang losses his soothsaying touch. But trust me, you’ll have to wade through at least 60 minutes of absolutely zero stimulus before you ever get to that point.
Two For The Money is a strange kind of bad. It misses nearly all of its dramatic beats and it isn’t nearly as fun or suspenseful as it wants to be. It never answers a paramount question: why should we care? Why do we care about Lang? What is interesting about this new world he is entering? Is there something dangerous about Pacino’s character? The trailers certainly lead me to believe there is something at stake here that I should care about – but I really can’t tell what it is. For a movie that insists that the stakes are high in the world of gambling, it never tells us what its characters have at stake. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street works in a lot of ways because Bud Fox commits insider trading and is always in danger of either running amuck with the law or being blind-sided by the greedy Gordon Gekko. Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire is great because of Maguire and Rod Tidwell’s David versus Goliath path that has you rooting for the reformed underdogs to make it big in the agent business and the NFL respectively. Two For The Money lacks any such dramatic hook and it all seems like such a waste because certainly there is a good movie that can be made about the world of high-stakes sports gambling. But when you have to resort to having Al Pacino literally fake a heart attack in one scene about halfway through just to make sure your audience still has a heartbeat too – well, there’s probably something missing from your screenplay.
Having not put much on the line, Two For The Money didn’t exactly hit it big at the box office. The movie pulled in a weak $23 million domestically, and with American football not exactly the most universal sport, Two For The Money only pulled in a meager $7.5 million from international audiences.
Disturbia
In theory, Two For The Money might have sounded decent. And in theory, Disturbia had no business being anything other than a travesty against good taste and the good name of Alfred Hitchcock. Disturbia (not quite a remake) is a teenage take on the Hitchcock classic Rear Window – and it is actually quite good. Disturbia takes nearly everyone off guard when the movie kicks off with teenage Shia LaBeouf’s Kale and his father getting into a violent car accident. Kale survives but forever blames himself for his father’s death. Anger issues compound the usual teenage angst and when Kale is put on house arrest for the summer, he takes an obsessive interest in seeing what the neighbors are up to. Disturbia, even with an ending that fits pretty firmly into the thriller mold, still manages to capture the awkwardness of being a teenager as well as the rush and buzz of voyeurism that made Rear Window so unique.
A lot of people dismiss the film a bit too quickly – granted, most films that have the gall to retread territory already walked by Hitchcock are asking for that type of dismissal on principal alone. But Disturbia is really more inspired by Rear Window’s themes than it is by the actual plot. And most uniquely, it is mature for a teen thriller. As a kid who blames himself for his father’s ill-timed fate, Kale finds redemption by the film’s end when he does right by his family and ultimately saves his mother from meeting her own grisly end. There is an extra level of depth that isn’t common in films of this ilk.
Disturbia was LaBeouf’s pre-Transformers coming out party, opening in April dead-zone that precedes the summer box office. Modestly budgeted at just $20 million, Disturbia was supposed to play second fiddle to an adult thriller with star power called Perfect Stranger. That release featured the always in decline, but never hitting zero pair of Bruce Willis and Halle Berry. Instead, Disturbia’s opening weekend matched Two For The Money’s final gross and doubled the opening of Perfect Stranger. And while Perfect Stranger slipped quietly into obscurity, Disturbia stood atop the box office for three straight weekends, totaling $80 million domestically and $118 worldwide.
Disturbia was executive produced by Steven Spielberg and distributed by DreamWorks – and it’s hard to say what, exactly, Spielberg saw that caused him to tap Caruso to direct Disturbia – but the move clearly paid off in spades.
Eagle Eye
Caruso made a strategic move by following up Disturbia with another Spielberg-executive produced flick and by reteaming with budding star LaBeouf. Eagle Eye falls somewhere between Caruso’s previous two efforts in terms of legitimate quality (keep in mind the entire quality scale for Caruso is a different barometer than we’ve used for other Director’s Spotlight columns). It sports a sleeker look and bigger budget than his other outings, but the story is pure Hollywood-crap.
Eagle Eye literally takes the concept “what if your phone called you claiming that if you didn’t do exactly what you were told then you would die.” Using that phone as an impetus for everything that follows in the next 100 minutes, you could essentially craft the most absurd, implausible, over-the-top, preposterous, and intermittently clever scenes and set pieces without any need to actually string them together with logic or linear sense.
But as every year we are reminded, plot isn’t everything to moviegoers, and Eagle Eye capitalized on a flashy and captivating trailer. Eagle Eye opened to a markedly strong $29 million, again more than doubling a star-driven opener on the same weekend (Richard Gere and Diane Lane’s Nights in Rodanthe). It had solid enough legs as well, giving it a total domestic gross of $101 million and another $77 million overseas. Compare that total against a large but reasonable $80 million budget and Caruso had a second straight box office success story.
The opening weekends of Eagle Eye and Disturbia are perhaps more helpful for distinguishing LaBeouf’s star wattage than his Transformers or Indiana Jones appearances. Next up, Caruso will have to prove his worth without his protégé, but not without a helping hand from Spielberg.
I Am Number Four
In the last couple of years, with such a down economy, studios in Hollywood have slowed down in optioning the rights to top-selling novels. The lone exception to that rule: young adult genre fare. It’s been ten years since Harry Potter took a hold on moviegoers, and Hollywood moguls are still searching for a franchise that can have a fraction of that pull and longevity. Even with that allowance, it is especially unusual that a book that is due for an August release has already been picked up by Spielberg, Michael Bay, and the DreamWorks team to convert for the silver screen.
I Am Number Four (the book) is written by James Frey – who is most notable for the Oprah Winfrey acclaimed-and-then-denounced biography A Million Little Pieces. Number Four looks to be a very different type of story – it follows the paths of nine gifted alien teenagers who survive an intergalactic war and take refuge on Earth. Apparently their enemies must kill them in order, and the first three have already met their end. I Am Number Four will follow the fourth alien teenager (presumably he will look like a CW starlet) as he tries to defeat his enemies and protect his new high school sweetheart in a small Ohio town. Apparently the first three to be killed off were all in far more exotic locations around the globe, but presumably the small-town America storyline will be more relatable.
As wary as I have become of every film that sets itself up as “the next Harry Potter,” I have a little bit more faith in I Am Number Four. First off, it returns Caruso to high school age characters. In his last three outings, by far the best thing Caruso was able to do was portray some of the fun and folly of 17-year-olds in Disturbia. Caruso doesn’t exactly seem to be stretching outside of the profitable little niche he’s built for himself – and that’s fine, really. Not everyone should be high-brow, and not everyone should try to be, either. But with screenwriters from Smallville working on the adaptation and sci-fi aficionado Spielberg backing him yet again, I Am Number Four could very well be a critical step in the right direction and another commercial success for Caruso.