1 gibble out of 5

Director: Brett Ratner

I had no idea this was a Ratner movie until the credit blipped up on the screen.  Still, I tried not to judge it ahead of time.  I dislike Ratner but I haven’t been able to say why, exactly.  I haven’t seen the Rush Hour movies, but people like them, so kudos and all, and I can’t really say how much of his stamp was on the third X-Men flick in comparison to a studio tampering with the thing.  He had a short in the “I Love New York” movie that I loathed, but whatever, that movie was mostly throw up anyway, so I still understood I couldn’t really judge him based off of anything.  But now I can.  And I dislike Ratner.

After the Sunset isn’t a bad film, really.  It’s just empty.  It strips successful elements from other films – buddy films, chase films, heist films, comedy romances – and strings them together with a winking plot and a nice looking cinematic sheen.  There’s not really a hiccup in the style, but again, that’s because there is no style past the surface.  To his credit, Ratner doesn’t do anything to fancy with angles or get a DP to go bananas besides making the tropic locale always look gorgeous, but I was also rarely compelled to look at the screen for the same reason.  This is a movie you can glance away from for minutes at a time to tie your shoes or steal candy from babies and return, get the obvious gist, and then tie your shoes again.

Pierce Brosnan plays a jewel thief who’s trying to retire with girlfriend Salma Hayek in some Bahamas or some place that I’m too lazy to double-check, but FBI agent Woody Harrelson just doesn’t believe he’s going to let one last diamond go, and so follows him on retirement, striking up an unlikely friendship along the way.  The movie starts with a pretty roundabout heist and then settles into a pretty chummy will-he won’t-he for the next 50 minutes or so before showing us if he does or doesn’t.  It’s well acted, the sequences are paced out appropriately – within the logic of the movie I can buy Pierce’s and Woody’s building camaraderie – and there are some chuckles.  But for every scene that plays well, there’s the nagging feeling that you’ve seen it before, and you probably have.  This isn’t new for movies.  A large batch comes out every year that are retreads of something or other, but something about Sunset’s tone seems to offer that a viewer will just want to watch because don’t we love girls like Hayek in bikinis?  Don’t we love charming thieves?  Don’t we love tropical resorts? and so doesn’t have to suspend disbelief (which all movies should do simply be keeping our attention) because certainly these flashing lights will distract us.  Unfortunately, this seems confirmed by the extras on the DVD, where Ratner essentially equates his films to entertaining popcorn and that he’d make another movie with Hayek in a bikini.

Sometimes I like popcorn.  Maybe After the Sunset was too buttery.