The Bourne Legacy

Baby, We Were Bourne To Run
Or
Pursued By Our Inner Damons

The "Bourne" series laterals the ball to another player in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth film of the series, which, by now, has nothing to do with the Robert Ludlum books on which they are titularly based (which is fine, as I read the first one decades ago and found it one of the worst reads ever).

When last we left Jason Bourne, he'd jumped into the East River to make a desperate escape from his pursuer/handlers, a nice turnaround from when the series started with him being fished out of the water with no clue as to his identity.  We start there again, but this time, we're Bourne again in another body of water with Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) on a training mission way out in nowhere, Alaska (all the better to see Russia, apparently), while the events of the previous Bourne trilogy play out in the States, sending a panic through the intelligence community and an order to purge the Treadstone Project (or is it Operation Outcome...or Operation Blackbriar...only Tom Clancy could keep track of this...and then he'd start a book-series (ghost-written) on each one!).  Whichever project is being scorched to the Earth, the talents from the previous movies (Scott Glenn, Joan Allen, David Straithairn) are dealing with the ramifications of Bourne's re-appearance, another intelligence head* (Stacy Keach-welcome back, sir) puts another middle-management type (Edward Norton) in charge of damage control (an impossible task in any recent spy film).**

As it becomes readily apparent on Renner's training mission, we didn't know diddly about the Bourne project (whatever name it was), as there are other agents like him, who are not only trained, but drugged to enhance their physical endurance, but also mental faculties (take the green and blue pills, but the yellow one you should really take with water or it gets stuck in your throat, evidently).  Just as Cross is about to rotate stateside, he and another agent get a drone-launched nasty-gram stating unequivocally that the mission is over.

That's how it starts, and goes all over the world, subsequently, even while it doesn't really go anywhere.  Oh, things happen, and things explode and people run around a lot (Rachel Weisz is a really good runner, by the way), but it's mostly just movement without any story momentum.  Most movies have a beginning a middle and an end, but this one is content to merely have a beginning, a middle and a chase.  

Tony Gilroy (who cracked the code for the first film—taking the germ of the idea and stream-lining it into a bare essentials man-on-the-run movie—directed the brilliant Michael Clayton and the disappointing Duplicity, one of those "I-get-the-drift-but-it-doesn't-work" movies) co-wrote this one and directed, employing the same kind of Paul Greengrass "run and shoot" style, but taming it down a bit, so it can be followed, as opposed to experienced in barely discernible flashes.***  It's a risk because the Greengrass adrenaline-fueled style keeps one from asking too many questions about the slowing-down factor of injuries and leaps in story-logic.  All well and good, I suppose, but one still gets the sense that Legacy is half-baked, with the kernel of an idea, some complications to keep things from getting too stale and large holes in the script filled with "a fight breaks out," "a chase happens," and "hero jumps from a fire escape into a window."  These all happened in the previous films, but I'll be damned if I can remember which specific ones—I suspect the answer is: "All of them."  They all blur together as the most memorable things are the action sequences, and there's a remarkable...uh...consistency to them.  The stakes are only the agent's own and most of the film's have very little resolution to them.  Legacy has none.  It just ends.

While one can admire the proficiency with which it is done, there's nothing all that memorable about this one...or the last one.  Even with fresh faces and a new idea of two, it's the same old thing, hardly worth being "Bourne" at all.

The Bourne Legacy is a Rental

  * You know, one could make a case for the excesses of "Big Gov'mint" just by noting the cast of good character actors in the "Bourne" series and all the different intelligence branches and mid-levels.

** Who fixes things in these films-and why haven't the unemployment rates dropped as a result?

*** This helped by a change in the style of Dan Bradley, who seems to have taken a film directing class in the interim, because his second unit direction in the chase sequences actually have some shots that feature relationship perspective going so far as to even including both participants in the chase in the same frame.  That's some kind of break-through after his disastrous work on Quantum of Solace.

Marvel's The Avengers

"We've Got a Hulk..."
or
Playing Your "A" Game


This one is The Big Pay-Off.

Back in the day (around about Iron Man) when they started doing teasers at the end of Marvel movies for the idea of an "Avengers" event, one hoped that they could pull it off.  Captain America needed to work (and it did). Iron Man II integrated other characters successfully.  They even managed to make Thor somewhat interesting.  And even though two "Hulk" movies under-performed at the box-office, there was still potential there.  Given the scenario of the "Ultimate Avengers" storyline (a revamp in the Marvel line that started everything over from Origin Story Square One with a decidedly more adult, realistic attitude...and a Nick Fury that looked like Samuel L. Jackson) a case could be made for a good old fashioned Marvel Jam story of the "When Titans Clash!" school.

The problem is all those heroes. It could turn into a mighty cluster, if there isn't a compelling story that slots heroes into appropriate scenarios, a problem with some of the "X-Men" films.  And one also hopes that there's a compelling reason for these guys to be here, that there is some character function going on, even though they have plenty of screen-time in their own series to work on those.

Will The Avengers "assemble" into a well-functioning superhero romp, and make Joss Whedon (who excels at ensembles) an A-list director that fans have been hoping for?

"Yes" to the former and "Maybe" to the latter, although pulling off this one is not an easy feat—so many particular and persnickety stars, so many owned and exploitable characters that corporations (and opposing film studios) want to manage, and so many potential minefields that it would take a superhero (with levitating powers) to rise above and negotiate them.  But Marvel's The Avengers (what they're calling this one to avoid any confusion) manages to be fast-paced, quick-witted, and, although slightly derivative (mostly of Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" series, with hints of The Andromeda Strain in sub-text, and, let's face it, most mythology and comic book tropes), and is, as one character analogizes, "a bag full of cats," fulfills its basic tenet: to be consistently entertaining, with crises every few minutes, wonders to behold (some of the sets are simply amazing), interesting pair-ups in terms of fights (Marvel heroes are always fighting each other—they're very turf-oriented, which is bad because they're all in New York) and dialogue.  

And it does two essential things: keep each individual hero definable in tone and action, and make those fights "followable"—this isn't a hodge-podge of pictures of punches, muzzle-flares and explosions, there is breathing room between sequences and shots, so an audience is allowed to register action and result, something missing from a lot of action movies, where there is either bad direction or a style-disconnect between various "units" filming.  It feels "of a piece," despite the subject of the film being about extraordinary outcasts aligning uneasily.*

In a pithy line of dialogue between "Iron Man" Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr. riffing brilliantly) and villain Loki (Tom Hiddlestone, registering far more than he did in the Thor movie)—everybody gets their Loki scene, The Hulk's being the best—the entire movie is summed up in an adamantium-encased nut-shell: "Yeah, takes us a while to get any traction, I'll give you that one but, let's do a head count here. Your brother, the demi-god; a super soldier, a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend; a man with breath-taking anger management issues; a couple of master assassins, and you, big fella, you've managed to piss off every single one of them."  

Motivation enough to form a coalition of the willing.  And the disparate styles of the players is well-evidenced-six degrees of declaration: Chris Evans is all un-ironic directness (even though he is perfectly capable of matching Downey snark-for-snark);  Chris Hemsworth is all stentorian brio done with Shakespearean force (he's so much more effective here than in his own movie); Jeremy Renner is as taut as his crossbow wire, Scarlett Johnasson's blank-stared Black Widow is well-suited for her position as a lethal scam-artist, Samuel L. Jackson manages to make even original lines sound like oft-quoted cliches; and Downey, quick and mercurial, dances around the dialogue, adding his own steps.  Each actor has their own way of working with Whedon's words, and Downey's pace has everyone playing their "A" game.

But the best here is Mark Ruffalo, playing Dr. Bruce Banner and (the first time an actor is allowed to, via motion-capture) his altered super-ego, The Hulk.  Two movies and two different actors (Eric Bana and Edward Norton, no slouches) tried to do something with the limited premise and came up short.  However, here, with less screen-time, Ruffalo manages to make Banner as interesting as his comically destructive "Other Guy," his physicist not guarded or fearful or weak (as has been the norm), but ironically bitter, resignedly haunted, the most mysterious of Marvel's "Mystery-Men."  "You really have got a lid on it, haven't you?" says Stark at one point, referring to the Doctor's self-control and the monstrous result of any lack of it.  "What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?"  Maybe The Hulk is such a one-smash pony that he's at his best as a supporting character, rather than the star of a movie series.  One could argue that about all the characters here with the exception of Downey's Iron Man, who is, due to the actor's efforts, a one-man circus.

But, here it's all in the group, nobody's around long enough to drag it down, and it's the interactions that count.  The plot is MacGuffin-oriented in the Marvel-style of "I-don't-know-what-it-is-but-it-sure-is-big:" the doohickey from Captain America and the whatsit from Thor are involved so that a race of advanced aliens can take over l'il old us.  Not sure of the motivation, but who cares? Marvel's The Avengers is big, bold, brassy and breezy, and has the feel and crazy zeal of those Japanese monster movies that combined a lot of characters and smashed them together.

I don't know what it is, but it sure is fun.**


Marvel's The Avengers is a Full Price Ticket.  (Go ahead, see it in 3-D)

All the potential Avengers, assembled by George (every little detail) Perez

* Whedon shows the eventual alliance solidifying in two nicely planned shots, one—used in all the commercials—orbiting the heroes as they "circle the wagons," and a meticulously planned CGI sequence in mid-battle that is the super-hero equivalent of "going around the horn."

** There are TWO codas this time: one after the initial credits (before they get into the detail stuff) and another one that was filmed right after the Hollywood premiere that's odd...but fun.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

"Mission: Incredibles"
or
"I'm Spit-Balling—It's Not All Going to be Gold"

The first Mission: Impossible film (based on Bruce Geller's TV series) was darned good—script tinkered by Robert Towne, nice set-pieces by Brian De Palma—while the second, not so much, a Woo-fest where star-egos and director-eccentricities clashed—and the third, directed by J.J. Abrams, a slight improvement, more gritty and down-to-Earth if nothing to really write home about.

The fourth, numerically neutral and titled Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, is actually the best of the bunch, much more in keeping with the original series' intent: a team of operatives plan out an unlikely spy-mission, fading into the wood-work, disguised and deceptive, insert themselves into scenarios that inevitably go wrong at some point, and they have to punt in order to get out alive and successful.  The big problem with the movie series (and its chief departure from its small-screen inspiration) is that Tom Cruise is the star and everybody takes second-seat to him, the other members of the team being merely escort planes to the Big Cruise Missile.  His character, Ethan Hunt, is supposed to be something of a cypher—all the IMF agents are—but more attention is paid to his character, while not really defining who he is, and as a result, you don't really care what happens to him.  There are no character peccadilloes or habits that one can relate to or identify as such, and what there is—no vodka martinis, but he always favors a celebratory beer at the end—is rather pedestrian.  So the movies are this weird yin-yang of Big Star/Small Character that crowds everybody else out.  The stunts are the stars.

That changes here.  Even though it is a "Tom Cruise Production" (executive-produced by J.J. Abrams), MI:GP is very much a team effort, with nice strong characters in the group (Cruise, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner) who are thrown together from a previous mission that goes "somewhat" awry and leads the President to invoke "the ghost protocol:" The IMF is entirely "disavowed" and The Secretary (there's been one each movie—Henry Czerny, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Fishburne, and this time Tom Wilkinson, the job must be the least secure in Washington D.C.) arranges for the closest team—Hunt's—to carry out a risky mission as they're already privy to inside information, and they're already deeply implicated in what has happened—which could see the resurgence in Cold War rivalries that will accelerate to nuclear-hot mighty fast.

So, it's just the four agents against the world, on a tight timeline and even tighter high-wire act to prevent terrorists from striking the match to the series' signature fuse.  And the nice thing is, it's not Cruise's show alone, it can't be, and Renner, Patton and Pegg are strong enough personalities, that Cruise doesn't even have to generously step out of the limelight for them.  It is a team effort, finally, the way the series was initially envisioned.  And the writers and director have set up some nifty clockwork scenarios that nicely merge into each other to create a steady stream of nifty sequences that make you stop and say..."Huh...Haven't seen that one before."

A lot of the credit should go to director Brad Bird, former animator and Pixar grad (he made The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and did the "save" on Ratatouille), who keeps things elegantly focused, tightly synced, and throws in more than a dash of surprising absurdism throughout the film.  Yeah, a lot of it's over-the-top—that's kind of the way it is with the MI films—but there is no stoic acceptance of the risks this time.  In fact, there's a bit of slap-dashery to the whole thing—everything that can go wrong does—the timelines, the tech and the teamwork, and the four are left scrambling trying to pick up the pieces.  Along the way there are nice little touches, like the comic bend given to the usual "this message will self-destruct in five seconds" bit, or an extended sequence of guard-fooling that wouldn't seem out of place in a "Roadrunner" cartoon.  Even the big set-piece—Hunt in Dubai having to spider-man up the glass face of the world's tallest building ("eleven stories up and seven over") is played for grins, albeit with the teeth chattering.  There is no Cruise brio in evidence for the stunt, his character doesn't want to do it, but he's the only one who can and...the clock's ticking.  That Bird milks it for all the tension it's worth and manages to make it pay off spectacularly and...with humor...shows he owes more to Buster Keaton than to typical action-directors who take this stuff so deadly seriously (credibility issues).

Credibility is the least of the concerns for the director of The Incredibles.  Instead, he and the MI team have provided a spy-romp that aims to be a thrill-ride that leaves one chuckling.  In that case, mission accomplished.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a Matinee.

The Hurt Locker

This week, we're re-publishing some reviews of the films from the post 9-11 environment.


Moonwalking Through the Kill-Zone
or
"Cravin' a burger. Isn't that strange?"

A lone figure walks down an alien landscape in a space-suit of Kevlar and crash-helmet, his only companions are his breath and his thoughts. Death surrounds him, and he walks towards the only certain death he knows of: a make-shift explosive device, conceived in cunning and hate that he must dis-arm in order to save himself, his comrades, and the watching by-standers, one of whom just might be waiting to explode the device. It is not some forbidden planet, or an anarchic Western town, but it could be. It's downtown Iraq, and it comes down to one man walking and facing his fear.Kathryn Bigelow will probably never be considered a "superstar" director.

That's too bad, because she miles ahead of the so-called "young Turks" doing action movies these days. Instead of following current trends, she adheres to the rock-solid action direction styles of Anthony Mann and Don Siegel: let the audience know what's going on, and one other thing that too many directors these days forget—an audience has to know the territory their heroes walk through to fully present the dangers they face. In The Hurt Locker she may use a hand-held camera a bit too much to re-create the verisimilitude of war-footage, but it comes in handy to lock you into the searching point-of-view of Bravo Company's of Bomb "Tech's" and "Post-Bomb Assessors"—"The Blasters"—in Iraq's Camp Freedom ("They changed it from Camp Liberty to Camp Freedom because Camp Freedom sounds better," says veteran Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) to the new Team Leader Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner, looking like a cross between Nathan Fillion and Brendan Fraser, like most of the principals of "The Hurt Locker," his performance is understated and full of small nuances). James is described as "a rowdy boy" and "reckless." Before his arrival, "the suit," that cumbersome Kevlar get-up which would protect anyone but the man who needs it most, has been the last resort in a disarmament situation. But that's not good enough for James. He likes to disarm the things by hand, and collect the odd bit of equipment for a trophy that "could have killed" him. He'll go in with "the suit" first, and puzzle the thing out, something that doesn't win him prizes with his team-mates, especially Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), because the longer it takes James to disarm a bomb, the more vulnerable his team-mates are to snipers.

It doesn't take long for the team to realize that James loves his work a little too much, and that it may kill them before their tour is up. Bigelow keeps a running track of the "short-timer" count-down as the situations become more dire and the traps more intricate, electronically and ethically.
War films have gone through a weird evolution from the time they were conscious enough to move beyond the "good guys vs. bad guys" (while still acknowledging that both sides share their share of casualties. But it's been since the Korean conflict that movies started to go deeper into the psychosis of war—not the PTSD issues, but the psychosis of being inside the conflict. One of the counselors at Camp Freedom ineffectually tells Eldridge "You know, this doesn't have to be a bad time in your life." Easy for him to say. All Eldridge can think about is the best outcome of the war—surviving it. And when his orders come down to "Be smart. Make a good decision" it's tough to say what is a good day and what is a bad day. But lately, war-films have taken a look at the man on the line and what makes a good soldier, and it comes down to a blurred combination of self-sacrifice and controlled psychopathy. Whatever the motivations its the results that count. We've seen that theme in Hell is For Heroes, and Patton, Apocalypse Now, The Burmese Harp, Full Metal Jacket, and Flags of Our Fathers. How the soldier compartmentalizes the war experience to survive and even stay sane through the fire determines his ultimate worth as a soldier and as a human being. It is that perspective, of life is brief increments, that keeps a soldier walking alone in The Now, where "The Big Picture" is unseen in the limited view of his path, unknowable and brutally finite—the past a bitter memory, the future an empty promise, and today is walked with the high of High Noon.

The Hurt Locker is a Full-Price Ticket.

The Town

"Prince of Thieves, Pillar of the Community"
or
"Taking Down the Cathedral of Boston"

Ben Affleck's directorial debut for Miramax, "Gone Baby Gone" revealed a film-maker of complexity and subtle visual skills, creating an intriguing film noir of corruption in high places for the best of intentions and the moral ambiguity of holding true to an ideology versus the considerations of pragmatism.  It was an ambiguous film that resolved the mystery, but not the implications of its characters' actions, and guaranteed lively debate long after its ending.

But what was clear was Affleck's ability to find the perfect shot and staging for making his points, along with a documentarian's eye for the lived-in detail; Affleck's vision extended beyond the bubble inhabited by the culprits in the scenario, and into a real recognizable, even mundane world.

So, my anticipation for his second film, "The Town," has been high.  My respect for Affleck the actor has never been high (save his subtle work as TV-Superman George Reeves in "Hollywoodland"), but "Gone Baby Gone" made you sit up and take notice of Affleck the director and writer.

I'd have been happy with more of the same, but Affleck has changed gears impressively for this crime drama about a foursome of expert knock-over artists (the FBI agent assigned to the investigation—played by Jon Hamm— calls them "The Not-Fucking-Around Crew") trained from endless hours of watching the endless array of CSI shows on TV, and the second generation of Charlestown townies doing the dirty work their fathers have engineered, or are paying the price for.  It looks like robbery, but it's more like literal class war-fare (with automatic weapons) between the have-nots and the "Hahvard" elite of Cambridge.  Affleck stages three intricate robberies, each one different in scope and technique and each with their own visceral power that catches one off guard with some truly impressive ways of presenting them.  The first, a bank robbery, starts with a black and white silent image (save for some electronic telemetry sound-design) from a security cam that explodes into color and sound when they burst through the door.  The second, an armored car robbery, with an elaborate get-away through tight streets and back alleyways that is truly frightening.  The third...I won't even say.  But, it recalls some doom-laden Alamo-like circumstances from a lot of fine film-makers of the past, and, like the other action set-pieces, it's filmed efficiently to provide just enough information, and propel forward to the next gut-wrenching development.  Howard Hawks once said of Don Siegel's hard-hitting approach to film violence "That stuff's hard to do."  Affleck makes it look easy, and he avoids embraced movie-cliches nimbly; he even provides one of the most inelegant fights since the fight in the bar in "The Treasure of the Sierrra Madre."

"The Town" has a great screenplay, too.  Frustrating, deep and complicated, it also provides nice grace notes that reverberate throughout the movie, and hang in the mind on the way home.

The story begins with that first robbery.  One of the managers (Rebecca Hall, who plays fragility as well as she does brittleness) is forced at gun-point to open a time-lock safe, while the crew spends as much time destroying incriminating evidence, as they doing sacking the loot.  An alarm is tripped and so she is taken hostage by the gang led by Jeremy Renner—doing great repugnant work—and Affleck, and released at the ocean's edge.  The trigger-men soon realize that she lives in their neighborhood, and it's decided to deal with her, which to avoid Renner's John Coughlin killing her, Affleck's Doug McRay takes over, and he becomes smitten as he sees the effects the trauma has wrought on her. Unaware of his part in their crisis, they begin a tentative relationship, and soon, he's caught in the middle, trying to hide double-truths from both his girl and his gang. 

"I'm sorry," he says (quite honestly) as she relates her fears about the incident.  "It's not your fault," she says, automatically...and the banal nicety hangs like an indictment between the two.

Affleck is less concerned with the expressive image here, and more concerned with the impactful presence, coding his film with broad strokes that link characters with circumstances and locales.  It's a broader, more tough-as-nails approach to film-making than his first film, and that extends to his portrayal of violence which is presented unflinchingly and coldly and fast.  Lives end in an instant, and the deaths are unromantic and not pretty.  In the meantime, the tensions of all things good and bad unravel skeins of connection, and the film ends unresolved...but not ambivalent.

"The Town" is a One Hell of a Matinee.

The Hurt Locker

Moonwalking Through the Kill-Zone
or
"Cravin' a burger. Isn't that strange?"

A lone figure walks down an alien landscape in a space-suit of Kevlar and crash-helmet, his only companions are his breath and his thoughts. Death surrounds him, and he walks towards the only certain death he knows of: a make-shift explosive device, conceived in cunning and hate that he must dis-arm in order to save himself, his comrades, and the watching by-standers, one of whom just might be waiting to explode the device. It is not some forbidden planet, or an anarchic Western town, but it could be. It's downtown Iraq, and it comes down to one man walking and facing his fear.

Kathryn Bigelow will probably never be considered a "superstar" director.

That's too bad, because she miles ahead of the so-called "young Turks" doing action movies these days. Instead of following current trends, she adheres to the rock-solid action direction styles of Anthony Mann and Don Siegel: let the audience know what's going on, and one other thing that too many directors these days forget—an audience has to know the territory their heroes walk through to fully present the dangers they face. In "The Hurt Locker," she may use a hand-held camera a bit too much to re-create the verisimilitude of war-footage, but it comes in handy to lock you into the searching point-of-view of Bravo Company's of Bomb "Tech's" and "Post-Bomb Assessors"—"The Blasters"—in Iraq's Camp Freedom ("They changed it from Camp Liberty to Camp Freedom because Camp Freedom sounds better," says veteran Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) to the new Team Leader Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner, looking like a cross between Nathan Fillion and Brendan Fraser, like most of the principals of "The Hurt Locker," his performance is understated and full of small nuances). James is described as "a rowdy boy" and "reckless." Before his arrival, "the suit," that cumbersome Kevlar get-up which would protect anyone but the man who needs it most, has been the last resort in a disarmament situation. But that's not good enough for James. He likes to disarm the things by hand, and collect the odd bit of equipment for a trophy that "could have killed" him. He'll go in with "the suit" first, and puzzle the thing out, something that doesn't win him prizes with his team-mates, especially Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), because the longer it takes James to disarm a bomb, the more vulnerable his team-mates are to snipers.

It doesn't take long for the team to realize that James loves his work a little too much, and that it may kill them before their tour is up. Bigelow keeps a running track of the "short-timer" count-down as the situations become more dire and the traps more intricate, electronically and ethically.

War films have gone through a weird evolution from the time they were conscious enough to move beyond the "good guys vs. bad guys" (while still acknowledging that both sides share their share of casualties. But it's been since the Korean conflict that movies started to go deeper into the psychosis of war—not the PTSD issues, but the psychosis of being inside the conflict. One of the counselors at Camp Freedom ineffectually tells Eldridge "You know, this doesn't have to be a bad time in your life." Easy for him to say. All Eldridge can think about is the best outcome of the war—surviving it. And when his orders come down to "Be smart. Make a good decision" it's tough to say what is a good day and what is a bad day. But lately, war-films have taken a look at the man on the line and what makes a good soldier, and it comes down to a blurred combination of self-sacrifice and controlled psychopathy. Whatever the motivations its the results that count. We've seen that theme in "Hell is For Heroes," and "Patton," "Apocalypse Now," "The Burmese Harp," "Full Metal Jacket," and "Flags of Our Fathers." How the soldier compartmentalizes the war experience to survive and even stay sane through the fire determines his ultimate worth as a soldier and as a human being. It is that perspective, of life is brief increments, that keeps a soldier walking alone in The Now, where "The Big Picture" is unseen in the limited view of his path, unknowable and brutally finite—the past a bitter memory, the future an empty promise, and today is walked with the high of High Noon.

"The Hurt Locker" is a Full-Price Ticket.